Word: delta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cracking the enigma of Mississippi's Delta for this week's issue, however, strained even Sidey's talents. To prepare for the story -- the latest in a series of dispatches appearing under the rubric Hugh Sidey's America -- Sidey spent two weeks poring over books on the region and interviewed almost 100 sources. "The Delta is so complex and different," he says. "There, the struggle for the nation's soul is still going...
Henry, a thickset man of 68, has been head of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since the civil rights movement was at its peak. Mississippi's Delta was one of its deadliest battlegrounds, a crescent of tormented land between Memphis and Vicksburg, hemmed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the poorest and blackest part of this country. A generation ago, some of the most oppressed blacks in the most harshly segregated state in the U.S. rose to claim their share of America's dream, and some whites did their violent worst...
Henry has just come out of a fierce redistricting battle in the state legislature, of which he has been a member since 1980. There are daily confrontations over housing, jobs and always the budget. But such battles now go unnoticed outside Mississippi and the Delta. "The spotlight is harder to focus here," he admits, and in that statement he may have defined the movement's great success. Now that the issue of legal equality has been laid to rest, blacks and whites in the Delta often stand together against outside forces, not each other. The war is economic and social...
Whether we are fully aware of it or not, the nation is still searching for its soul in Mississippi's Delta. Thirty years ago, blacks risked their lives if they tried to vote. Today there are 28 black mayors in the Delta, an area about 200 miles top to bottom and 85 miles at its greatest width, with 340,000 people, 55% black. There are black sheriffs, police chiefs, city-council and county-board majorities. Just across the tracks from Henry's store is the office of Henry Espy, black mayor of Clarksdale, at 20,000 the upper Delta...
...reasonable attempt to comprehend Bangladesh's afflictions could find a moral in them. In 1970, a year before the birth trauma of the Bangladesh republic, a cyclone may have taken half a million lives. The number was only a guess: survivors, typically poor rice farmers and fishermen on exposed delta islands, can never afford to count the lost. Their suffering -- starvation, cholera, typhus -- is just beginning. Tagore identified April with Rudra, the Indian storm god, but Sea-Waves is really a meditation on "brute Madness." Wonders the poet: "Why in its midst was the mind of man placed...