Why is Mississippi such a backwards, dysfunctional dump?

The south has been ruined by confederate holdovers.

It’s time for sweeping reform in the south. The numbers are there. Let Georgia be the guide.

Take back the south from the traitors. Give the land back to the people. The legislators of MS, TN and AL are racists institutions that need to be dismantled and returned to the people through fair elections.

Smart people get the fuck out of Mississippi as fast as possible.

The state is a lost cause unless it can convince educated professionals they want to live Mississippi.

It’s a beautiful place. Breathtaking.

But until the loony legislators are run out of office it will never reach its potential.

Half of these legislators were at the Capitol on the 6th trying to recreate the battle of bull run.

Plenty of places in the South have been doing great r1, look at North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Nashville in Tennessee. Booming with educated young people moving there.

It's Alabama and especially Mississippi in which no young professional wants to live.

Tennessee and NC still have backwards legislative bodies despite their respective largest cities becoming more functional.

The actual states are still woefully behind where they could be. There are no unions down there and the legislatures forbid the local cities from their own autonomy.

mississippi's capital has no power

You can’t get any women’s services south of the Mason Dixon. They hate women down south and want to be allowed to own their wives as property.

It is the people not the landscape, OP.

People get the government they elect.

Mississippi still has no running water. Texas has the same problem. These republican run shitholes are dragging the country down. So much of the U.S. 15 trillion in debt is because of these shithole takers. All they do is line up with a hand out. It should not be allowed to continue.

"The bill signed by President Biden would give Mississippi - the poorest state in the country - an estimated $600 million to expand Medicaid to roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people in the state."

Health insurance for 250,000 people!

Governor Reeves says no.

What is wrong with these people. They are going to have to pay for all these sick people anyway so why not give them healthcare?

The only reason they do this is to stop black people from getting stuff.

Mississippi needs it's own Stacy Abrams.

These states will go to the ends of the earth to stop black people from getting something. Even if they have to cut off their nose to spite their face.

Georgia has a combination of black people + college educated whites that can be convinced to vote Dem r14. Mississippi doesn't have the Atlanta burbs with lots of college educated whites.

Their white people stake their identity om Trumpism.

But he took all their money and left them to die. Republican controlled states are dangerous. All the pollution and oppression. It cost the country trillions in red-state welfare.

Why do we let them get away with this? They need to held accountable. It is time for democrats to go on offense and take the country back from traitors. They tried this in 1850 and didn't learn their lesson.

It is not fair to the people of these states. They are being held hostage by the state legislatures. These are American citizens that need to be freed from their captors.

Alabama voted for a democratic senator in 2016. So it is possible.

or 2018

Anybody visit there recently? It is beautiful

There are shelves and shelves of books written about the culture, politics, sociology, economics etc of the Deep South, OP.

The shorthand is: ingrained cultural racism and mistrust of non-local elites - as a product of slavery. (In other words, American racism developed to justify slavery)

I doubt it will ever change.

I lived there for almost ten years, and it's not beautiful or breathtaking, that's ridiculous. It's pine forests and swamps and farmland, flat as a board and hot and rainy as shit. The coast is the best thing about, and that's not saying much.

Also, I believe that picture at OP is a result of erosion (as in: due to decades of agricultural mismanagement, not as is: Grand Canyon).

Red Bluff looks beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

I had read a long while back couple percentage points of homes in Mississippi do not have consistent indoor plumbing. I am uncertain of the veracity of that but if true that is something!

Mississippi has an interesting history: (via wiki)

On December 10, 1817, Mississippi became the 20th state admitted to the Union. By 1860, Mississippi was the nation's top cotton-producing state and slaves accounted for 55% of the state population.[5] Mississippi declared its secession from the Union on March 23, 1861, and was one of the seven original Confederate States, which constituted the largest slaveholding states in the nation. Following the Civil War, it was restored to the Union on February 23, 1870.[6]

Until the Great Migration of the 1930s, African Americans were a majority of Mississippi's population. Mississippi was the site of many prominent events during the civil rights movement, including the Ole Miss riot of 1962 by white students objecting to desegregation, the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, and the 1964 Freedom Summer murders of three activists working on voting rights. With large areas of agricultural based rural towns, Mississippi frequently ranks low among the U.S. in measures of health, education, and development, and high in measures of poverty.[7][8][9][10] In 2010, 37.3% of Mississippi's population was African American, the highest percentage of any state.

Religion & racism.

It would be nice to see the south finally reach its true destiny.

Slavery really did a number on the south. It never got the chance to fully blossom and has been stuck in the 1850s every since.

If they can find a way to admit they were wrong and just move on then the states could heal and try to reach for a sensible future, one that could host people from all over the country. The south could quadruple its tourism if people were not so scared to go there or felt like they had to go 100 years into the past to visit. Or to set up business and commerce.

There is a lot of untapped possibilities for the south but until the legislatures represent the interests of the citizens, it is going to be a tough climb. The gerrymandering is off the charts. The corruption is all out in the open. Republicans stuffing the ballots in broad daylight.

There is no reason for many of the ills to happen but the same few people in these states are blocking progress for millions of citizens. You can count on one hand the number of people who keep the south as it is. It is not Lindsay Graham. It is not national figures or even governors. The heads of the legislatures in the south. 5 or 6 people that oppress millions.

That photo looks like it's in Utah.

Parts of Georgia are also extremely beautiful. From one extreme to another. It's like being on another planet down there.

But they have the most ridiculous amount of rebel flags and civil war regalia and just an overall unwelcoming attitude towards outsiders so it ruins the experience. You always feel like some "authority" is breathing down your neck.

It's a shame really. Most southerners were nice people until they cranked up all the tea party/deplorable/white supremist timeline. I am afraid of what comes next in that sequence? Zombies?

Miss says No to mediacl MJ but Yes to Sudafed/Claratin meth ingredients..

What does that tell you?

The legislature is so corrupt in MS you could have a newspaper just dedicated to that. Everyone should pick a deplorable state and watch the legislatures. Forget the govs. You would NOT BELIEVE what these people get up to. Who is going to report it? What media?

It's all due to racist, sexist, old white conservative "Christian" men.

Gee, I wonder what they need this for?

I bet you the speaker of the MS legislature is a meth dealer.

These people are so wildly corrupt down there I wouldn't put it passed them.

Wasn't there a movie with Chevy Chase where they stumble on a state like this and all the judges are crooked?

Ok, in most states you don’t need an Rx for pseudoephedrine. They sell it behind the counter & you have to ask for it. In some places you need to show your driver’s license & they scan it. So they keep tabs on who is buying pseudoephedrine, but don’t require an Rx.

Mississippi and Oregon required an Rx however. I’m sure there was some payoff to politicians for this, but not sure what it was. So now Mississippi doesn’t require a prescription. You’ll probably have to show your license like other states require. You still aren’t going to be allowed to just go buy armfuls of boxes of pseudoephedrine.

PS - OTC Sudafed does not have pseudoephedrine in it. It has phenylephrine in it, a much less effective decongestant. The Sudafed with pseudoephedrine in it is behind the counter & must be asked for. Periodically Twitter shows a photo of Donald Trump smiling with a drawer full of Sudafed behind him & everyone screams about how he’s a meth head. But the Sudafed in the drawer behind him is British & it contains phenylephrine, not pseudoephedrine.

[quote]The only reason they do this is to stop black people from getting stuff.

Bingo!

It's more than just racism, that exists everywhere.

Curiously though Mississippi and West Virginia are among the few states that don't allow religious exemption to school vaccination. I don't know how that happened.

Go drive down and get your vaccines. No one wants one there so they are giving them away.

No economic development. The same black and white families that were in power in 1890 are in power today. There are no jobs other than chicken processing plants and prisons, so there's no movement in or out of the area. People have no education. It's the same in North Louisiana.

[quote]If they can find a way to admit they were wrong and just move on then the states could heal

"They" here refers not to the southern population per se, but to the reactionary whites who control everything. The black population and the whites who aren't fundamentalist Christians have long been ready to "move on." Political power needs to move to the general population from the fundamentalist white oligarchy that have ruled the South since time immemorial.

That's like a chicken and a egg situation though r41.

Mississippi is very cheap so on paper enticing for a business, but if you wanted to open something there where is the labor pool r41?

Mississippi is arguably the most uneducated state in the union, there is little skilled labor.

I hate so much to see people give up on the south like it can't be saved. I think if this concentration of power at the state legislature can be won by more forward thinking people. It can be done.

You have to have a strategy that seeks to gain majorities in the state legislatures. The Heritage Foundation figured this out and has focused on state legislatures to hold the old line. That is where the electoral focus needs to be in order to gain back the south.

[quote] Mississippi is very cheap so on paper enticing for a business, but if you wanted to open something there where is the labor pool [R41]?

I agree. The labor is uneducated and unskilled. There's no political will to change that, or even in attracting industry because it would change the power structure of local and state politics. People can't even leave really because they have nowhere to go and no skills to sell if they do go somewhere. When I lived in the region, every so often a company would talk about opening a branch, but it never came to pass. There's no housing to move people in, and there's no skilled labor to draw on.

I just found out how northeast Mississippi, as well as western New York state, became part of the Appalachian Regional Commission, it's ludicrously funny.

"IN 1966, a retired high school principal named George Thompson Pound reached for his Rand McNally atlas. He turned to page six, took a pen, and drew off Appalachia. Starting in West Virginia, he marked along the Blue Ridge Mountains, through the Carolinas, northwest Georgia, and east Alabama.

But Pound kept going. He marked past the clear end of mountainous terrain around Birmingham, Alabama, and passed into North Mississippi—his home. With the stroke of a pen, Pound boldly reimagined geography and race in one of America’s most notorious Jim Crow states. He fused the imaginative work of region-making and mapmaking into a lasting political reality for the land and its people.

Pound made his map for Mississippi’s governor and congressional delegation. These political elites, segregationists like US senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis, hoped the federal government would include northeast Mississippi in its new Appalachian Regional Commission (arc), a Great Society program that eventually distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments."

-----

"During rebuttal, Appalachian Republicans challenged Mississippi’s revisionist geography. Kentucky senator John Sherman Cooper unfurled a topographical map of the Appalachian region from the US Geological Survey. “The Appalachian Region has always been recognized as an area characterized by mountains, high hills, and rugged terrain,” he urged the committee. “The purposes of the Appalachian Redevelopment Act are largely directed to the human consequence of this physical geography.” Cooper’s map showed the Appalachian terrain terminating south of Birmingham, Alabama—well east of the border with Mississippi. Additional counties diluted the arc’s power to redistribute tax dollars to the mountain South, he argued. His objection was entered into the record without comment."

----

"Appalachian governors welcomed Mississippi to the fold, but Lyndon Johnson was an unknown. By March 1966, the group resolved to test the president’s commitment to including the Magnolia State. While at the White House for the annual Governors’ Conference, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania assembled the other Appalachian governors and approached the president in the Rose Garden. First, Scranton proposed, Congress could include counties in west Alabama and Tennessee—counties originally excluded for lack of mountainous terrain—in order to extend Appalachia to the Mississippi state line. Then, in a quid pro quo, fourteen counties of Western and Central New York would join Appalachia alongside twenty counties from North Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson approved. He left the particulars to the Conference of Appalachian Governors, who met at the Greenbrier resort on December 16, 1966. There, surrounded by ridges of West Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, the governors welcomed mountainless Mississippi to Appalachia."

The full article is in Southern Cultures, Volume 26, Number 4, Winter 2020, pp. 90-109, "The Making of Appalachian Mississippi" by Justin Randolph

r3 What about Tennessee ? Is there any hope for change there?

Hopefully more minorities and progressives will continue to move south and reclaim their family heritage. MS had more blacks than any other group at one point.

If all of the descendants move back then they could make a difference.

R46 good find.

Racism is the white southerner's heroin. The US took their slavery away in 1865 and white southerners have been chasing that white supremacy high ever since. Like any other addict, they'll impoverish themselves chasing that high. They'll cheat, steal and lie for it.

[quote]The gerrymandering is off the charts. The corruption is all out in the open. Republicans stuffing the ballots in broad daylight.

Addict behavior in the service of white supremacy.

Economic development isn't going to cure what ails white southerners. They need rehab.

These should have been donated to descendants of the enslaved families of the plantations.

But instead they would rather let them whither away. What ever happened to reparations? This is the least they could do.

If they gave away lands in MS, TN, KY and GA then the south would be blue again. There is plenty of open land out there. Lots of dilapidated farms and they could be put to use.

Actually this gives me hope. Biden got a lot of votes in 2020 Mississippi race/

T: 756,764 B: 539,398

Percentage 57.60% 41.06%

There are many open minded people around Jackson or Hattiesburg, but it's the smaller towns surrounding them that give the state a bad name. Jackson has now been deemed too dangerous to life in for a lot of the uppity white people and they've moved into the suburbs surrounding Jackson like Madison, Clinton, Brandon, Pearl, and Ridgeland to escape the big bad black people.

My family lives there and, on a recent visit, I saw many signs for Trump still in people's yards. Many can't give it up. Lots of sad, uneducated, and angry white people down there with victim complexes.

When you consider that about 38% of the population are African American, and Biden only got 41% of the vote in Mississippi, I wonder if that means Mississippi had the lowest percentage of white people voting for Biden in the country? (guess you'd need to know what percentage of the vote was white vs AA)

I blame Rush Limbaugh. his listeners have no education and they trusted him like some god. Anyway, he turned out to be a fraud and never was a conservative after all. He really took those fools to the cleaners. Sold them kids books any everything and then renounced every word that was in those books. SMH. He messed those people up for life.

What an American travesty.

the south still has a lot of problems. I went into a store and no one would wait on me. When I purchased something they threw my change at me because I was a Yankee. I'm white and everyone in the store was white.

Because of the way the whites have always treated the blacks, they can be just as bad. We stopped at a KFC to eat something and didn't realize how segregated everything was. After we sat down and looked around we realized that not only was everyone black but they were all staring at us. Both of us instinctively knew that it was time to go even though we hadn't finished eating.

I never went back to the south and hope I never have to again.

Parts of it are so godforsaken. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I think once things calm down with Covid that congress and the White House need to go on a Southern Swing tour.

When is the last time you saw a president in Mississippi? Or Alabama? They get away with too much because there isn’t enough national attention to that part of the country.

R55, Mississippi also has a HUGE issue with suppressing the Black Vote, so imagine that only a fraction of the Black People in Mississippi actually voted (either were ABLE to vote, or just thought why bother?)

It's a great shame. Mississippi has great riches in many forms of architecture, an amazing landscape, rich agricultural and transportation resources, and a history that encompasses every important theme of American history in one densely concentrated mass that is important to unravel, strand by strand and to understand the whole of the country, not just one of its most forgotten and neglected and backwards states.

If I had to pick one place from which to study and explain the history of all the U.S., I would pick Mississippi. It's a distillation of a whole country, with examples in the extreme, in large scale and in small of every crisis and every failing and every triumph of Americans.

R61 I agree. Endlessly fascinating. MS especially.

A lot of the south is just abandoned. You look around and wonder where all the people went. The history is still there. The outline of a building is still there but no people. It is eerie af.

Of course I’m not talking about Atlanta or Nashville but everywhere in between. You will pass an area where the whole town is covered in weeds.

Sure, R61. Easy to say if you don't have to live there and deal with the locals.

And if you DO live in Mississippi, more power to you. But I bet it's Fondren or the coast and not Winona or McComb or Wiggins or something like that.

R63 & R64, I wouldn't think it would be easy to live in Mississippi, and I don't live there. For me it would require an ongoing effort to learn and understand the place or it's history at least, in depth and detail. That would be a sort of tax for living in a place where violence and inhumanity were and are too often washed over with weak excuses and sentimentality.

It would be easier for me to live a fairly grand life in MS, the sort of grand house I'd be pressed in afford most anywhere else; an entree via shared interests and human connections into elite circles of people who do have even grander houses and lots of money (a different class than the angry white politician class); and the exaggerated privileges that come with having just a little more money than some others in that landscape.

I could live in Natchez, even Vicksburg or Columbia, maybe; or Oxford. Natchez is one of the most fascinating places on earth, connected in some way to every place else, but to live there would require a sort of schizoid double life in another place, a frequent ticket out, and not to NOLA or Atlanta or Charleston, but way out.

There is an interesting book by a British journalist (link) that explains the difficulties and the unexpected rewards of an outsider living in Mississippi, the Delta region in his case His approach was measured and cautious and well-meaning while still trying to immerse himself and to understand a strange landscape, and his experience went in different directions as these things do.

That class you describe never really existed in Mississippi. It makes for a neat fantasy, but the reality is living somewhere in a town where the only grocery store is Wal Mart. Oxford may have the snobs you are looking for, but mostly is a bunch of people wearing evening dress to a football game. What you describe sounds more like a version of antebellum Charleston, minus the slavery. The racism poisons everything.

I don't really understand the fascination with the Delta either. I know plenty of people from there, and they are nothing special. It's a dreary place, the last part of the state to be settled, because it was a howling deadly canebrake before it was drained by agribusiness speculators and settled by black sharecroppers and vicious pig-eyed white overlords.

I should be nice, honestly, usually any discussion of rural America here is just references to Bumfucke. I guess Mississippi has more mystique than, say, Utah.

Have you ever been to Utah? The landscapes there are amazing and the Native history is astounding. Even the Mormons managed to do some interesting things.

But I'm of the mind that every US state has its high points. Even North Dakota is a majestic landscape once you let yourself see it.

Sadly, it has some gorgeous areas. But a lot of the people are just assholes b

The history of Utah is actually extremely interesting, R69, very true, but I wouldn't go so far as to say the state has any mystique. Or at least any more than MS.

The south is wasted on the deranged racists who run the state assemblies. A lot more people would move to warmer climates if it weren’t for the backwards politicians that run the show.

Would love to see southern people rise up and take back their states. It would be a dream come true.

R73 then why are you in NYC?

Didn’t Mississippi do well distributing Covid vaccines? That was odd. They’re doing better than my state.

I like Oxford in the North, there’s a lot of great music and a small but vibrant arts community. I’ve been surprised by all the progressive pockets popping up all over the south, it’s going to be very different in twenty years.

Mississippi isn’t a shit hole. It really isn’t. The only downfall is the people.

But even with Covid, they handled it well unlike many other red states.

Today Mississippi dropped all the requirements (other than being over age 15) to get a Covid vaccine. I think Alaska did so even sooner.

So if you're anxious, come on down. (or up, if you choose Alaska)

I would not say they are doing well at the vaccine at all r75. They are #44 at percentage of vaccines used.

The Democratic Party nationally, essentially dismantled state parties in the deep south beginning in the 1960s. Support dropped which included ignoring financial needs and investing for the future. Today, the party is not well organized in much of the south. Not fielding candidates for the higher offices is not uncommon. In Arkansas, Tom Cotton ran for re-election unopposed. Did Tom Perez care? Apparently not.

R78 but they also have had a lot less Covid cases than most places. They’ve done well throughout this.

If they've had less covid it's only because they're a backwater. My friends in MS tell me that masks never really happened there.

Today, anyone is eligible (16+) for the Covid vaccine.

There are plenty of blacks and white right-wingers refusing to take the shots. That is not unique to Mississippi or the south.

And I think they have lots of vaccine because it isn't in demand.

Referencing Mississippi.

R81 it isn’t all backwater. It has some beautiful parts.

Do we think that Mississippi leaders are really reporting accurate Covid stats? What’s to make them do that?

By backwater I meant: a place nobody visits or leaves, hence the covid numbers.

I lived two years in Mississippi.

I am a fisherman. Some of the best fresh-water fishing in the U.S.

Also, saltwater fishing in the gulf, off the Mississippi coast is usually excellent.

Are you into gambling? Just get on one of the boats @ Gulfport. As long as you're off land, you can gamble in a boat casino, even when docked.

The casinos are allowed on land now, R88.

The very poor region of Mississippi is the delta. It is heavily rural, and the once vibrant agricultural output is basically a fraction of what existed prior. Few jobs are available.

R89, I heard that, but forgot. Thanks for noting. That happened years after I lived there.

“a fraction of what existed prior. Few jobs are available.“

This is what is so weird about that area. The whole south really. It doesn’t make any sense.

During Katrina all of the floating casinos were thrown onto the shore and smashed everything up, so they changed it.

There are some newer jobs. There are car plants in the south (because: no unions, along with the tax concessions). Nissan in MS, Mercedes in AL, Kia in GA.

Mississippi is worse than Brazil, because everyone is fat. The shittiest place I've ever seen in the USA, and I've traveled to most states, and lived in a dozen, was Friars Point Mississippi. I was driving cross country with a friend, and she wanted to see the romantic "Old South". I pulled off the interstate and found this place. It was 1995.

The gas station was a persons HOUSE, like an old house with a gas pump out front, and the convenience store was the living room.

The old black man was very friendly, although thought it was weird that we weren't locals, and his fridge had cokes, diet cokes, beer, and it was cold and cheap. Restroom? It was UPSTAIRS, up crickety old stairs. My friend was unwilling, decided she didn't need to go.

Then we tried to get back to the I, and got lost, and found shacks with outhouses, and asked for directions from another old black man, who was also friendly, but he had one of those voicebox throat synthesizer things, that was too "Southern Grotesque" like a Flannery O'Connor short story.

Anyhoo, my friend decided "The Old South" sucked and never wanted to go back. I lived in Georgia, and Texas before as a kid. I do think people are often nice, and the southern hospitality thing was real - at least at the time.