The Atlantic: White Flight “Ravaged” The Mississippi Delta

Two days ago, The Atlantic published a ridiculous article that really hit home with me: How White Flight Ravaged the Mississippi Delta.

The article blames the Whites who were displaced from the Mississippi Delta after the Civil Rights Movement for the failure of victorious SJWs to usher in their “post-racial” paradise after fifty years of social engineering directed from Washington:

“In the Mississippi Delta town of Tchula, there’s a fading columned mansion that once belonged to Sara Virginia Jones, the daughter of a local plantation dynasty. Its walls were lined with nearly 400 works by artists as prominent as Paul Cezanne, Marc Chagall, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol. …

But as the mansion’s flaking paint makes clear, the transformation was about a transfer of local power, not wealth. Families like the Joneses have long since left Tchula, taking their business and money with them. The remaining community is 97 percent black and achingly poor. …

Among the key towns of the civil-rights era, those with the largest black majorities are frequently in the most economic trouble.”

In the Delta flatlands and the hillier country to the east, the landscape is dotted with towns and cities that figured prominently in the civil-rights era. Like Tchula, many of those places are now languishing.”

In the Mississippi Delta, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had the desired effect: every single public school, park, restaurant, hotel, private business and so on has been integrated for decades now. Segregation was dismantled, blacks were enfranchised, and now blacks are politically dominant in the Delta, which sends Rep. Bennie Thompson to Congress. In fact, Mississippi has more black elected officials than any other state, largely because of their racial dominance in the Delta.

What could be wrong with this picture? The black mayor of Tchula now lives in the big house. Blacks own the remnants of the local business district. Blacks dominate the public schools which are lavished with federal funds to overcome “inequality” and the “legacy of slavery.” The nasty “white supremacists” have quit the area, which is no longer troubled by lynchings, or oppressed by its multitude of black mayors, black congressmen, black state legislators, black attorney general, or its black president.

“Carthan makes no secret of his disdain for whites who decamped for other locales, as well as those who continue to avoid moving their businesses to black-majority towns. But he also blames the current, majority-black population. “Three or four generations of people raised on welfare—everybody knows the problem,” he said. “Single-family homes, drug-infested neighborhoods, the youth always on social media, exposed to everything. Ear rings, nose rings, lip rings, baggy pants. I’d expect they’d show some appreciation, but a lot of them don’t know their history. That’s a challenge. It’s very difficult for the teachers to even teach school. They’re rebellious. They have the freedom, the resources. They don’t have the restraints we had in the ’60s.” He shakes his head. “What goes around comes around. We’ve come a long ways, but we’ve got a long ways to go.”

Black empowerment, integration, federal oversight, and lavish anti-poverty spending by the federal government … isn’t that exactly the kind of “progress” that was prescribed by SJWs, which was going to cure the Mississippi Delta of all its ills? And the result was White flight, crime, baggy pants, single family homes, and blighted and drug infested neighborhoods? Who could ever deplore such a brilliant policy?

“But after decades of public notoriety and internal strife, Philadelphia has become one of the most successful towns in the region. The economy is diverse, drawing on a mix of farming, manufacturing, forestry, and service industries, with the added boon of a nearby Choctaw Indian casino. The county has also set up an enterprise incubator to provide office, manufacturing, and warehouse space to startup businesses.

James Young, the town’s black mayor, says this economic expansion was possible only because white residents faced the shame of their past. “People didn’t turn away,” Young said. “They didn’t move away.”

In Philadelphia, MS, the Whites haven’t abandoned the town – Philadelphia remains 55% White – so conditions there haven’t yet sunk to the level of the black majority towns in the Delta. In the Alabama Black Belt, which is where I am from, there are lots of cities and towns like this which are hanging by a thread: Eufaula, for example, hasn’t yet declined to the level of, say, Selma, Union Springs, or Tuskegee.

All of these places are “ravaged” by inept public policies imposed on us by SJWs in Washington which are based on the false premise of racial equality. The same is true of sub-Saharan Africa where the smartest and most talented blacks are just as eager to escape the results of black majority rule as the White remnant left behind there. The reason why African immigrants come to the US and Europe and earn so many degrees is because they don’t want to go back to Congo or Nigeria!

From the Mississippi Delta to Detroit, and from Port-au-Prince to Kinshasa, the negro politician who now lives in a decaying mansion in a blighted city abandoned by Whites under the duress of SJW crusades is actually a pretty common sight. Next month, we are going to take a closer look at some of these places.