Making Cold War Whiteness: Race and Immigrant Labor in the Cold War South—The Case of Mississippi’s Latvian Cotton Pickers

In November 1948, the first Latvian “Displaced Persons” — or “D.P.s” — arrived in the Mississippi Delta.  At its peak, perhaps 700 Latvians lived scattered across northwestern Mississippi, with hundreds more having passed through the area.

The Latvians had an impact well beyond their small numbers.  When a few of them complained about their living and working conditions shortly after arrival, the Soviet Union seized upon it to embarrass the United States and the international refugee resettlement program, regional and national media dispatched journalists to investigate, and the U.S. State Department prepared to discuss the matter before the United Nations. 

The Latvians’ biggest impact, however, was local, for the Delta was unaccustomed to the arrival of hundreds of European immigrants in such a short time.  Entire towns turned out to welcome them, and local media devoted front-page coverage to their arrival and subsequent articles to their adjustment to life in their chosen homeland.  Many of the Latvians went to work on local plantations, mainly as sharecroppers, and at burgeoning postwar agribusinesses such as the Delta & Pine Land Company.  Black labor had been leaving the Delta for years, and the Latvian D.P.s would provide the region’s planters with a new source of labor.  Delta planters hoped that Latvian D.P.s would not only fill a labor shortage, but also form a white bulwark against the rising tide of black civil rights.  This required some racial sleight of hand, for the Latvians had to be transformed from racially undesirable aliens to suitably white citizens.  The Latvians looked the part, but it was their anti-Communism that proved crucial to their acceptance in the Delta as well as the nation.  The Mississippi Delta’s Latvian cotton pickers provide historians with a case study for the intersection of race, labor and politics in Cold War America.