Seeking Work, Beauty, and the Blues: Rewriting Forgotten Histories of the Mississippi Delta

In 1947, Armie White – my grandmother – left Scott County, Mississippi, in a hurry. Orphaned as a little girl, she came of age on a plantation with her four siblings, sharecropping for an uncle she only ever described as “mean” and “callous.” Eighteen and newly married, she sought a fresh start. Instead of heading to Chicago like her older brother and thousands of others, she went instead only 150 miles northwest to the Mississippi Delta; this would be her new beginning. A decade later she was joined by her baby sister, Berniece, and, as an extended family unit, they migrated throughout the Delta looking for work amid the persistent rural poverty of the Delta. They ultimately set their roots in a small town in Sunflower County, bustling with juke points and possibility for work outside of the cotton fields. As a historian of the Black freedom struggle in Mississippi and granddaughter of the Delta, I return home frequently for research, sometimes finding traces of my relatives in the archives in my work about rural Black women’s experiences during the Civil Rights Movement. In my writing, I try to rebuild the world of “blues and balling” and the good factory jobs my great aunt shared with me during our last drive around many of the now forgotten towns in the Delta. This paper contextualizes the historiography of postwar Mississippi through my own family history and the memories passed down about movement and migration within (as opposed to outside of) Mississippi. It tells the story of ordinary Black women searching for opportunity inside of the state of Mississippi and finding it.