That’s When the Whites Just Started Moving Out”: Black Rootedness, White Flight, and the “Post-Blues” Mississippi Delta

• In Event: 399 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration

Abstract

In the last fifty years, the American South has undergone significant social change. Latino/a immigration, economic and political restructuring, and the re-migration of black populations to the region have transformed the southern landscape, prompting many scholars to champion a South that is, once again, “new.” The scope of these changes has attracted increased empirical attention, and the resulting body of scholarship positions the South as a harbinger of broader trends in economic development, social relations, and racial attitudes. While this research has advanced several paradigms of social science research, including perspectives on urbanization, racial/ethnic relations, and immigration, its focus on metropolitan places and populations negates the different, but no less strident, patterns of structural change that have taken place in rural and small-town southern communities. In particular, while the conventional post-1960’s narrative of southern change trumpets the region’s demographic and economic dynamism, many rural and small-town communities have experienced an alternate reality—one of sustained, and at times drastic, population loss, increasing racial homogeneity, and near-ubiquitous socioeconomic decline. This study examines social change in the rural South through a case study of post-1960’s Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town in the Mississippi Delta. I trace aggregate and neighborhood-level shifts in Clarksdale’s racial and socioeconomic makeup and interrogate the implications of these changes for local culture and social life. I focus particular attention on the contours and implications of what many Clarksdalians refer to as the “great white flight,” or the out-migration of more than half of the town’s white residents since 2000, and still more in the preceding three decades. I situate this demographic trend in the context of other local and macro structural shifts—for example, recent efforts to “revitalize” spaces in the town centre—and chronicle local efforts to make sense of and negotiate these changes in everyday civic life. A central goal of the study is to examine how these local efforts, what I refer to as “place-making projects,” challenge and reinforce broader tropes about Clarksdale, the Mississippi Delta, and the South. By turning attention to the “New South” narrative of what is widely referred to as an “Old South” town, this study serves as a corrective to the current urban-centric story of southern change and lends to broader discourse on race relations, culture production, and inequality.

Author

• Brian Foster, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill