The communities surrounding the Mississippi Delta are facing challenges produced by pervasive injustices. Slavery, both historic and modern, has long been a premise underlying the Delta’s mutually reinforcing systems of industrial agriculture, fossil fuel, and incarceration.

As such, the region has some of the highest poverty rates in the country. Residents increasingly experience extreme storms, flooding, and compromised air and water quality. In this context, imprisonment has mistakenly been used as a vehicle for economic development. Each of these systems intensify the ways in which vulnerable communities, typically low-income, Black or African American, and/or Indigenous, are impacted by climate change.

Amidst brutality, people have still shown time and time again their capacity to thrive. The land surrounding the river and delta is exceptionally fertile. The region’s music, literature, and other modes of artistic expression are inextricable from American canon. However, such resilience should not justify needless suffering and absolve doers of harm. In a more just society, the lives of those in the Delta would move away from generational traumas and closer to a collective vision for human and environmental flourishing.

The Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez were the three largest groups living in the area that became the state of Mississippi. In the 16th century, Europeans arrived and brought enslaved Africans to work on plantations. Throughout post-colonial America’s growth, Indigenous people were enslaved, killed through genocide, or forced to give up land. Between 1801 and 1830, after numerous coercive treaties and forcible seizures, the Choctaw alone ceded more than 23 million acres to the United States. They and other groups were effectively removed by the federal government from their ancestral homelands.  

The Mississippi Delta region is defined by the river. The soil is fertile, the wetlands vast, and the flooding catastrophic. Levees along the Mississippi were built using exploited labor of African Americans to protect the investments of landowners. In his book, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in Mississippi, Clyde Woods asserts that “the levee system was, and is, one of the defining features of Delta capitalism.”

The protection these levees afford is not evenly applied. The failure of the levees surrounding New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina displaced over 1.5 million mostly Black people, destroying their homes and communities. This natural hazard became an even larger disaster as racialized policing skyrocketed in the aftermath of the hurricane, with white residents “finding” food and Black residents “looting” grocery stores.

Explore work Designing a Green New Deal in the Delta below, beginning with a Field Guide to the Mississippi Delta.