Word: cotton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...success of the Espys and other middle-class blacks is a fragile thing. Welfare payments are the largest source of income in rural areas, greater than King Cotton. The Third World poverty in towns like Tunica (23.5% unemployment) and Jonestown (pop. 1,400, of whom 1,300 are black) is a reminder that civil rights laws alone cannot guarantee opportunity...
...places like these the problems are so basic they seem anachronistic: plumbing, paving and food. Jonestown's energetic Mayor Bobbi Walker is scrounging for $3,000 in private money so the Habitat people will come in and help replace 30 dilapidated shacks. Cotton planting and ginning take only about six months of each year, and there is no other work for the Jonestown families. Yet Mayor Walker and her small cluster plod on. A sewer system will be completed in a few weeks. Running water is now in most homes. She's working to get hot water to every family...
...Civil War ended slavery, but its aftermath produced sharecropping, a form of exploitation almost as severe. And the Delta was battered by all the economic swings of farms, its routines upset by advancing technology. When the sharecroppers were replaced by mechanical cotton pickers and tractors after 1940, the Delta blacks joined the 5 million Southern rural blacks who fled to the cities of the South, West and North, bringing to urban culture their broken hearts in a tragic search for a fragment of dignity and security. That migration, one of the largest such internal movements of people in history, transformed...
...days of reckoning are upon the Delta. A lot of the old family landowners have sold out to corporate interests. The Prudential Insurance Co. is one of the huge Delta operators. Low prices for cotton, soybeans and rice and climbing production costs have squeezed farmers. "Nobody in the Delta is worth more than $10 million," says Billy Percy, one of an enlightened family of statesmen, writers and planters. "Maybe one," he corrects. "He made it in Holiday Inns. I used to be able to have four bad crop years before I would be in financial trouble. Now if I have...
Eschewing "Harvard's Puritan Heritage," this saucy and heretickal Fellowe Elponseth instead ye visions Doctrine of "Unitarianism." He difparageth further that goode and great Gentleman ye Reverend Doctor Cotton Father...