Three sociologists mapped American poverty and then spent time in the most disadvantaged places to determine what they have in common. Their book, The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty, by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy J. Nelson, identifies one of those places as Leflore County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Greenwood.
The authors looked at statistics for 3,600 cities and counties and focused on four places that scored the highest on their “Index of Deep Disadvantage.” That index took into account the percentage of people with incomes below the national poverty level, the percentage with incomes less than half of that level, low birth weights, low life expectancy, and a low likelihood that a child born in poverty would be able to escape it as an adult, something called “intergenerational mobility.”
One thing that tied the four places together was a history of dependence on a dominant source of wealth. Greenwood has prided itself as the “Cotton Capitol of the World.” A South Carolina county in its Pee Dee region made a similar claim for its bright leaf tobacco. A Kentucky county boasted of its coal. A county in southwest Texas was so proud of its spinach production that the county seat boasts a statue of Popeye.
Another, and related, common thread, was a history of a small managerial class dependent on a large number of workers regarded as being socially inferior, including African Americans in Mississippi and South Carolina, Mexicans in Texas, and “hillbillies” in Kentucky who were once thought to be of “substandard racial stock.”
They found other markers as well: unequal schools, a collapse of social infrastructure, violence, public corruption and inequities caused by historic racism.
To be sure, not every community was alike. In Greenwood, the number one problem, at least to the African American community, is violence. In the year they studied, the national average for homicide deaths in a 100,000 population was 4.1. In Greenwood, it was 19.2.
The authors concluded that the best predictor of violence in a community was not the failure to hire enough policemen a low or a high degree of economic inequality but rather a low rate of intergenerational mobility. One Greenwood leader called this a “hunger hypothesis.” People turn to violence when they see no prospect of getting ahead in life or controlling their future. On the intergenerational mobility score, Greenwood came in lower than all but eight of the 3,600 communities.
And the unemployment rate in the county is 7.1 percent, twice the national average. The authors discount the possibility that public welfare is to blame. Mississippi’s welfare benefits are the lowest in the nation. Adults with no dependents are not eligible for many programs. The state has 200,000 children in poverty but only 6,125 receive direct benefits from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Instead the authors blame prison records that disqualify job applicants and a lack of basic skills: in the public schools, less than 25% of students show proficiency on the state math test. The state average is 47%.
What the authors say Leflore County needs most is a middle class holding white collar jobs. The authors say that their “most advantaged” communities, mostly in the middle west, are communities in which incomes are more equal.
They see some hope in that Greenwood has become something of a company town. They say the two principal employers today are Viking Range and Milwaukee Tool, a company that can pay $10 an hour in Mississippi for labor that costs $20 an hour in Wisconsin. But they fear that the town is vulnerable to future trade wars: It lost Baldwin Piano to China and the once-growing catfish industry has suffered from the import of fish from Asia.
And the condition of the schools does not encourage development of a middle class. The authors regret the white flight that segregated the schools in the 1970s. They say that today Pillow Academy, the local private school, has a 3% African American student population but, according to its website, no African-American teachers. They see some hope in a local charter school effort, Leflore Legacy Academy, which is attempting to raise academic standards.
It is relatively easy to see why inequality persists in Leflore County, despite modern industrialization efforts. Almost two centuries ago, a French student of life in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, predicted that ambitious skilled immigrants from Europe would settle in the northern states, and not in the south, because in the south they would have to compete with slave labor. For decades after the Civil War, railroad rate discrimination made it difficult for manufacturing to take hold in the south, and in agricultural areas poor schooling for African American children was seen as a way to retain an unskilled labor force.
The authors make suggestions. They see hope in community-building efforts, such as the Greenwood Mentoring Group. They point to library programs in other states that help reinforce what they call social infrastructure. They advocate a higher minimum wage. Perhaps the job training now being pushed by the Mississippi Economic Council would help. But absent some sort of initiative, it would seem that the most logical solution for those who see no chance for economic improvement in Leflore County: To pick up and move to a community that does provide that chance. That is a very sad thing to say, but it would provide at least one way to improve the fate of one woman they interviewed, whose three husbands had all been shot to death.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
