Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

Epilogue: The Delta Then and Now

Epilogue: The Delta Then and Now Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well. Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us. Surely, they must know that their deliverance depends on letting down their ropes. Only by working together is escape possible. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well All God’s dangers ain’t a white man. Nate Shaw, from All God’s Dangers: The Autobiography of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengarten In bringing these fragments to a close, it is important to remind myself and my readers of that poignant statement by Nate Shaw (whose real name was Ned Cobb). I’ve endeavored to tell my story honestly and truthfully. Yet, there might be those who find in my recounting of the injustices I experienced coming of age in the Delta an effort to lay all the problems I faced at the feet of the southern white man. If Nate Shaw could conclude after all the hardships he encountered, including a twelve-year prison sentence, that there were evils at work other than those posed by the white man, certainly I, facing fewer cruelties, should admit the essential truth of this point. Yet blacks of Shaw’s generation and of Epilogue: The Delta Then and Now 204 my own know well that most of the problems we faced could be traced back to a few whites determined to uphold a brutal and stifling system of racial apartheid . Nate Shaw was an Alabama farmer and a younger contemporary of my Mississippi-raised grandfather. They would find much in common in their stories . Much of the prejudice they faced was still present during my youth. The Delta of my childhood, in important ways, is now but a distant memory. Indeed, the Delta and the South in general have made notable strides in the area of civil rights, but it’s fair to point out that it had a very long way to go. Today, thankfully, the “whites only” and “colored” signs are permanently archived in museums and libraries for students of this region’s history. No blacks are denied admission to restaurants, hotels, and theaters based on the color of their skin, and the public libraries, once off-limits to blacks, are now truly public. The changes in the political arena are even more dramatic. In my youth, there were no African American police officers and firefighters. The first black officers had to call a white policeman before they could arrest a white person. Now, Greenwood has both a black police chief and a black fire chief. The city also has had in its recent past a black mayor. These are changes I couldn’t have dreamed of as a boy in Greenwood. Whenever I allowed myself to dream about the future, I thought about how great it would be for me to be Greenwood’s first black mayor. At the time, I thought the goal of becoming president of the United States was more attainable. Now, Mississippi has more black mayors than any state in the union. The progress that blacks have attained in the political arena, of course, may be attributed to their having finally achieved the franchise first guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment but not enforced until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When I look back on the number of marches and the amount of canvassing we did to help get the voting rights and public accommodations bills passed, I take a great deal of satisfaction from those efforts. In recording the progress that has been made, it’s also fair to say that the Delta, as James Cobb declared some years ago, remains “the most southern place on earth.” Here, habits die hard, especially those involving race relations. While official apartheid has ended, as well as Jim Crow laws restricting access to public facilities, there is still an unspoken tension as regards racial mores in the Delta. Richard Wright in the early years of the twentieth century was perplexed at the existence of “two races that never touched it seemed, except in violence.” Blacks don’t face the violence from whites that was once a daily occurrence; 205 Epilogue: The Delta Then and Now however, they still don’t touch in any meaningful way. Blacks and whites...