Introduction
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Route 61, Mississippi Delta |
The landscape of the Mississippi Delta stretches flat and empty beyond the horizon. In January, the fields are dead. Only a few pieces of cotton remain attached to their stalks reenforcing the feeling of overwhelming desolation with each passing mile of the seemingly endless road of route 61. Houses are few and far between. It is almost like no one lives in the Delta anymore. Driving through towns there is no Main Street. The remains of the main streets in each town are the same. Locked up behind the plywood that covers each storefront windows are better days that can be seen through the broken glass. There was once a busy life in the Mississippi Delta, but now hardly anything is left. What brought the Delta to such a demise? The answer lies in the Great Migration and |
| The two World Wars provided well-timed opportunities for African Americans to leave their lives as sharecroppers
in the South and to redefine their status in the North. Newspapers such as the Chicago Defender
described the abounding possibilities in the city. Economic conditions in the South could not sustain life for
the sharecropper. Years of farming and borrowing on credit forced the sharecropper deeper into debt. A vicious
cycle that only stopped when the sharecropper left the Delta. Sharecroppers left for opportunities that did not
exist in the South. Families left the Delta either together or separately. Often times men traveled to the North first to secure work and a home before sending for |
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