THE OTHER
AMERICANS
for white farmers, and free blacks
flocked to the area as sharecroppers. Its population is now predominantly African-American.
But just as the untameable Mississippi still rises here, often leaving many of the poorest residents
vulnerable to devastating floods,
so too does the residue of racism
and discrimination linger in the
Delta. In the tiny town of Cary, I
visited the town hall, a two-room,
one-story building adjacent to an
empty field where a lumber mill
once stood. Inside, the walls of the
building are lined with carefully
framed memorabilia reaching back
decades: black-and-white yearbook
photos and sepia snapshots of local
sports teams, high school dances,
returning war heroes.
Virtually every smiling face in
every photograph is white.
Cary’s population, on the other
hand, is two-thirds black.
I asked Leslie Brock, the deputy
clerk and the only occupant of
the building, why that’s the case.
“Well, you’ve got to think about,
at that time, things were segregated,” said Brock, who grew up in
the area around Cary and is black.
I suggested to her that there must
be at least a few contemporaneous
photographs of African-American
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
families from the area—black
schools, black proms?
“You would think so,” she
replied.
Brock, who left the Delta for Los
Angeles at 18 before returning in
her early 40s two years ago, grew
up in the sort of sparse “shotgun
house” that predomin FVB