The Mississippi Delta Chinese are a small community of Chinese Americans that has lived in the Mississippi Delta region since the late 19th century. A related population of Chinese Americans lives across the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta and the nearby city of Memphis, Tennessee. [1]
The earliest Chinese settlers in the Mississippi Delta were laborers recruited by cotton planters to supplement the recently emancipated African freedmen during Reconstruction. Like other early Chinese Americans, the first Chinese immigrants were peasants and merchants from the Sze Yap region of Guangdong province in Southern China. All of them were single and married men who worked in Mississippi and sent most of their income back to their families in China. As they were neither black nor white, the Chinese were often classified as "colored" in early government records. [2] [3]
By the end of the 1870s, the Chinese had abandoned the plantations and began opening small family-owned grocery stores in the many small towns of the Delta. Chinese families began moving to the Delta in the early 1900s, and most modern Mississippi Delta Chinese are the descendants of Chinese who arrived in Mississippi during this time. Until the end of the 1900s, Chinese-owned groceries could be found in every Delta city and town, serving both white and black customers. Chinese children were originally segregated from the white public schools, and segregated Chinese schools were built for them in Greenville and Cleveland. However, these schools were closed and Chinese children were allowed to attend both white schools and white colleges after the Second World War. [4] [5] [6] [7]
The population of the Mississippi Delta Chinese exploded after war. Many young Chinese men from the Mississippi Delta served as soldiers during the Second World War, and many women from China married these soldiers and settled in the Delta as war brides after the war. By the 1970s there were as many as 3,000 Americans of Chinese descent living in the Delta, especially American-born Chinese children who were raised in the Delta. For decades the Mississippi Delta Chinese community was one of the largest Chinese American communities in the American South, but since then, many families have moved to larger cities in Texas, the West Coast, and the Northeast. Most of the historic Chinese groceries have already closed, and only a few families remain in the Delta. [8] [9] [10]
Arriving into a strictly segregated society with whites on top and blacks on the bottom, the Chinese carved out their own unique niche in a primarily biracial society. Neither black nor white, they were initially classified as "non-white" and later as simply "Chinese". While not seen as being on the same social status as whites neither were they seen on the same level as blacks despite often living in black neighborhoods and serving mostly black clients and customers. The Chinese were middlemen between blacks and whites, often providing a needed contact point in a segregated society. The Chinese initially attended separate Chinese schools separate from both blacks and whites although in later decades before segregation officially was outlawed, they often attended schools with white students. In many cases they sought to identify with white society as much as they could due to whites having the highest status in Jim Crow society. [11] Many Chinese men, for the lack of Chinese women to marry, married Black women.
Arkansas is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the Osage language, a Dhegiha Siouan language, and referred to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.
Washington County is a county located in the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census, the population was 44,922. Its county seat is Greenville. The county is named in honor of the first president of the United States, George Washington. It is located to the Arkansas border.
Holmes County is a county in the U.S. state of Mississippi; its western border is formed by the Yazoo River and the eastern border by the Big Black River. The western part of the county is within the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. As of the 2020 census, the population was 17,000. Its county seat is Lexington. The county is named in honor of David Holmes, territorial governor and the first governor of the state of Mississippi and later United States Senator for Mississippi. Holmes County native, Edmond Favor Noel, was an attorney and state politician, elected as governor of Mississippi, serving from 1908 to 1912.
Clarksdale is a city in and the county seat of Coahoma County, Mississippi, United States. It is located along the Sunflower River. Clarksdale is named after John Clark, a settler who founded the city in the mid-19th century when he established a timber mill and business.
Greenville is a city in and the county seat of Washington County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 34,400 at the 2010 census. It is located in the area of historic cotton plantations and culture known as the Mississippi Delta.
The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth", because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It is 200 miles (320 km) long and 87 miles (140 km) across at its widest point, encompassing about 4,415,000 acres (17,870 km2), or, almost 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain. Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War (1861–1865). The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of enslaved African Americans, who composed the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states which were most dependent on plantations and slavery prior to the American Civil War. Following the war, the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era. Before 1945, the Deep South was often referred to as the "Cotton States" since cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped usher in a new era, sometimes referred to as the New South.
Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the exclusion on account of race of a child of Chinese ancestry from a public school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision effectively approved the exclusion of any minority children from schools reserved for whites.
The nadir of American race relations was the period in African-American history and the history of the United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the early 20th century, when racism in the country, especially anti-black racism, was more open and pronounced than it had ever been during any other period in the nation's history. During this period, African Americans lost access to many of the civil rights which they had gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legalized racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased.
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
LeRoy Percy was an American attorney, planter, and Democratic politician who served as a United States Senator to the state of Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.
Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.
Racial segregation in the United States is the systematic separation of facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation on racial grounds. The term is mainly used in reference to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, but it is also used in reference to the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority and mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, and the separation of roles within an institution. Notably, in the United States Armed Forces up until 1948, black units were typically separated from white units but were still led by white officers.
Whitecapping was a violent vigilante movement of farmers in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was originally a ritualized form of extralegal actions to enforce community standards, appropriate behavior, and traditional rights. However, as it spread throughout the poorest areas of the rural South after the Civil War, white members operated from economically driven and anti-black biases. States passed laws against it, but whitecapping continued into the early 20th century.
The Arkansas Delta is one of the six natural regions of the state of Arkansas. Willard B. Gatewood Jr., author of The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox, says that rich cotton lands of the Arkansas Delta make that area "The Deepest of the Deep South."
Mississippi is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Mississippi's western boundary is largely defined by the Mississippi River. Mississippi is the 32nd largest and 35th-most populous of the 50 U.S. states and has the lowest per-capita income in the United States. Jackson is both the state's capital and largest city. Greater Jackson is the state's most populous metropolitan area, with a population of 591,978 in 2020.
Black schools, also referred to as "colored schools", were racially segregated schools in the United States that originated after the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. The phenomenon began in the late 1860s during Reconstruction era when Southern states under biracial Republican governments created public schools for the formerly enslaved. They were typically segregated. After 1877, conservative whites took control across the South. They continued the black schools, but at a much lower funding rate than white schools.
A segregated prom refers to the practice of United States high schools, generally located in the Deep South, of holding racially segregated proms for white and black students. The practice spread after these schools were integrated, and persists in a few rural places to the present day. The separate proms have been the subject of frequent press coverage, and several films.
Norma C. O'Bannon High School is a public junior and senior high school located in unincorporated Washington County, Mississippi, USA, adjacent to Greenville. The school is part of the Western Line School District. The school includes students in grades 7 through 12.
The black-and-tan faction was a faction in the Republican Party in the South from the 1870s to the 1960s. It replaced the Negro Republican Party faction's name after the 1890s.