The struggle with poor support has been a subtext for much that passes as race politics in the early 21st century US. Sunflower County’s woes are a snapshot of the value of that debate to materially impoverished children and single moms who struggled alone in the TANF era. In the TANF and post-TANF eras, in rural areas with large shares of blacks, poverty was and is high. Jobs were and are scarce and seasonal. Wages were and are low. Licensed quality childcare was and is negligible and unaffordable. Schools were and are segregated. Too many have been in a recession their whole lives. The War on Poverty and Great Society did not eradicate poverty in America, but during the years when the programs flourished, poverty dropped to its lowest recorded point in US history. Half a century later, in 2020, poverty rates in the US reprised the rates just after the War on Poverty. The child tax credit and the ETIC would lift families out of temporary poverty. During COVID-19 and racial crises in the United States, unemployment benefits and stimulus checks would give the poor a life raft. The old child tax credit eliminated 27 million low-income children.

The enslaved descended families featured here faced a particularly harmful man-made peril throughout their lives – legal racism. Some were more bound by caste than others, but all suffered more than what was just and necessary. Natural disasters often amplify man-made insults, including devil’s bargains baked into the constitutional edifice, non-inclusive economic jobs and corporate recoveries, market health care biases, anemic homeowning opportunities and unfair wage structures, inequitable health care and public education systems, the elite’s disregard for the rule of law, and environmental insults such as locating large shares of black residents in flood zones or near power and other processing plants.

Why have the greater number of blacks not been able to get and stay ahead? How have some, despite the unfavorable odds, been able to climb? What might we learn from the experience of this second group? These questions matter for our understanding of intergenerational and intra-generational thriving in the rural and urban contexts. In their totality, these and related questions enumerated throughout this work, invite an intentional focus on whether there have been and now are patterns to the routes, rates, and stability of movement toward the middle and upper class over two generations.

Where one enters the economic mobility story, which rungs, which race, which gender, which mindset, which opportunities, and with what politics all matter. In 1916, two years before Jack’s birth, Bilbo had served his first term as governor of Mississippi. Later, at the time of Jack’s adolescence and late teenage years, Bilbo would again serve as governor, from 1928 to 1932. Bilbo would run for the US Senate and win. He served from 1935 to 1947, just as Jack was reaching young adulthood and preparing to attend college and law school. Jack had long observed the movers and shakers and vowed to become one.

Though their identities extend far beyond this designation, sharecropper families are defined as families in which the children and their parents live on plantations and work for a share of the wages that they and their parents earn. Agnes and Josie were mothers and wives, churchgoers and seekers of housing stability. As croppers, they did not own the several homes they lived in or the lands they worked on. Their economic precariousness is what defined them in the history of the Delta. However, what defines them in this examination is their fullness as human beings-their experiences and desires, successes and failures as wives, parents, workers, and members of the community. It is nonetheless true that their familial experiences and desires cannot be understood except in the context of racial history, mass violence, and economic exploitation. This constellation of the Sunflower Seven permits three vistas from which to gather economic mobility knowledge- from those of perennial croppers, quasi-croppers, and their better-positioned birth peers, Harper and Byrd.

Second-generation children considered here have included Andrew Brown, the son of Agnes Brown; Eddie Landfair, the son of Josie Landfair; and Isaac Byrd, the son of Hattie Byrd and cousin of Lonnie Byrd. Like Andrew, Eddie did not see himself as a failure, yet he acknowledged that he did not have enough ambition. So far, not one male or female child in this cohort has blamed the white man for his or her limited opportunities, let alone her or his failures. Each of the sons, Edward and Andrew, was preaching to the next generation about ability and effort. Edward’s mother, a sharecropper for forty years, taught him to work hard, demand respect, not to take a back seat, to be himself and believe in God. He passed these words and values on to his children. The sharecropper’s mother seemed to have known better than Andrew Brown, the high school principal, that respect was owed to each human being and should not be premised on ability. Devaluing others because of their limited ability or lack of opportunity is not just evidence of a lack of empathy; it is also an invitation to see people as less worthy of investment and support.

In 1890, the Mississippi re-segregation constitution became the governing instrument of legal racism. In that same year, of the nine million African Americans in the United States, seven million lived in the South. From 1888 through the 1890s, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad was selling land in Sunflower County at $5 an acre, on installment plans. The opportunity for wealth-based farming and land ownership brought the Byrds from Sumter County, Alabama, which itself was a settlement originated by Seminole Indians, to Sunflower County, Mississippi, some 205 miles away.

A century after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, Julian Bond observed in the 1970s that what passes for public education in the South has been a distressing and dehumanizing process for black children. Despite this indisputable fact, the black working rural poor, who cleaned the toilets, picked the cotton, logged the timber, cared for whites’ children, and cooked the meals of the white leisurely class, believed in educating their children. However, segregated public schools, even good ones with value-added teachers, were built sideways, to affirm the present rather than confront public dispossession. Still, they were, for many, places of heterogeneity, populated by blacks of all classes, aspirations, and hues, environments where Lonnie, Matthews, Clementine, and Williams and their children were poised to learn. Schoolmates whose parents were part of the tiny middle class, those whose parents were among the ambitious working class, and the teachers who believed in and challenged them, as best they were able, to orient children’s imaginations toward the future. Some individuals and organizations worked to support these aspirations.

Scott County produced its share of white lawyers and medical doctors during the period from 1857 to the 1950s but did not have black lawyers until well into the 1970s. After Meredith’s success at entering Ole Miss, two E.T. Hawkins High school graduates in the Forest Municipal School District applied to Ole Miss School of Law, and one, Constance Slaughter-Harvey, was the first African American woman to graduate from the law school in 1970. Her parents, W. L. Slaughter and Olivia Kelly Slaughter were college educated. Mr. Slaughter, a World War II veteran, and alderman was a school principal at North Scott Attendance Center, and Ms. Olivia Kelley Slaughter was a journalist. The other black and native-born Forest resident, Willie Lovelady, a first-year law student at Ole Miss in 1970, drowned mysteriously in the swimming pool at Ole Miss.

Differences in the industrial urban economies and cities’ political receptivity to African American shares conditioned the quality of familial economic and employment transitions. When Mamma Rose first moved to Keefe Avenue in Milwaukee, formerly a bustling Irish community, there were few blacks on her block. Each summer, during our month-long visits, I noticed a change in the neighborhoods. The mom-and-pop stores disappeared along with the whites who had once dominated the area. Drugs and drug dealers were said to run the neighborhood. Only Jeremiah Missionary Baptist Church remained unchanged; it was packed to the brim. Mamma Rose and Aunt Earline, her youngest daughter, sat with the other women of the church dressed in white, from head to toe, listening to the Reverend Fred Boyd from Morton, in Scott County. Among the young, many are idle. Unemployment and low-skill levels are challenges. The closure of the key industry, Modern Line Products, in Indianola, also spurred unemployment and the citizens’ interest in looking elsewhere for employment. Work opportunities paved the way for David Williams to buy a barbershop. Alderman David Williams, Sr.’s barbershop had proved a mainstay and a place of refuge and personal pride in old age. Throughout the century, the economy surrounding them diversified, but the wages remained bare, even at Walmart and local businesses. Many unemployed youth and adults are ill-educated. Year after year, many of the schools attended by poor children performed at the bottom of the state. Most black children (born between 1944 and 1960) of the primary families (born between 1909 and 1932) who left the Delta for college, and after college, left the state to secure post-collegiate education, had the fastest exits from poverty.

Social and behavioral scientists and humanities scholars, especially historians and economists, have offered a context for understanding what it means to be down and out in America across time and place. Economists have analyzed the determinants of economic mobility and which factors create varying rates of sustainable economic progress. For example, Raj Chetty has posited that social capital, segregation, inequality, school quality, and family structure are predictors of economic mobility. Apparent, too, in Chetty’s work, is economic mobility’s bidirectional trajectory, both upward and downward. This bidirectionality means that some in the middle class have been able to rise from the lower class, and some have fallen from the high-income quintiles to the middle class and below it. Economists such as William Darity and Darrick Hamilton, economic stratification economists, have shown that income inequality and wealth inequality are not the same, and hence, securing income equality alone will not reduce wealth inequalities.