HANGING TOUGH Macey Baird

Hanging Tough

People of both races are leaving Greenville in droves. But there are many in the Delta’s biggest city who think they can turn things around. or one brief shining moment, Greenville thought it might just be Mississippi’s Camelot. It was the “Queen City of the Delta,” a regional business powerhouse, a busy Mississippi River port, a place with the Delta’s only shopping malls, home to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper and the longtime chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party. Through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, it looked like Greenville couldn’t lose. It was the “Towboat Capital of the World,” base to a home-grown shipbuilding and barge industry that employed thousands. When the rest of the Delta was trying to seduce small sewing plants that employed dozens, Greenville had manufacturing f plants that hired hundreds. It landed plants from the likes of Boeing and Vlasic. It had a Schwinn bicycle plant, Chicago Mills, and a branch of one of the largest carpet companies in the nation. They were generally minimum wage jobs, but jobs nonetheless.

BY MACEY BAIRD

Greenville was home to a thriving cultural scene and a stable of nationally known authors. The city integrated its schools peacefully, hired black policemen and employed black store clerks before much of the rest of the state, building a reputation as one of the most progressive places in Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael famously called it “the rest stop for the civil rights movement.”

And then it all went away. Camelot turned out to be a myth. Greenville had been living on borrowed time. Its large population of poor people, its de facto segregated schools and its fragile, vulnerable economic base caught up with it — a trend all across the Delta. In that respect, the city turned out not to be so different after all.

Today, Greenvillians shake their heads at the town’s fall and longingly recall when stores were packed on Washington Avenue, when Greenville “was a place so proud of itself it strutted sitting down,” as Hodding Carter III, former editor and owner of the Delta Democrat-Times, says. That spirit remains in pockets. Small bands of stubborn optimists inside and outside city hall refuse to surrender hope, feverishly plotting ways to revive the town and boost the economy, but they are bucking powerful economic trends.

PHOTOS / ELIZABETH BEAVER The GREENVILLE in the sign welcoming people to the city was once part of the huge Greenville Mills sign before the plant closed.

A parade downtown in Greenville’s heyday. Once, the city’s parades drew large crowds.

Greenville has lost its swagger. And no wonder. It can seem a grim place, littered with strips of empty parking lots that have replaced businesses. Many people are discouraged. Those who have spent generations in the city are leaving.

Today, downtown looks like it is dying. Cars hobble through potholes on Washington Avenue. They pass strings of pastel-colored, once-luxurious homes, many now boarded and broken, peeling and unkempt, their prestige faded, just like the city.

The popular clothing stores that once anchored the western end of downtown are gone. Instead, the street that was a few decades ago the busiest in the Delta is full of boarded-up buildings and littered with “For Sale” signs.

Just over the levee, two mostly working-class casinos — nothing like the glittering casino-hotel complexes in Tunica — have replaced the old marina in a stretch once known as the MillionDollar Mile. They perch on prime lakefront, drawing a low-income crowd that pulls slot levers and prays for a big payoff.

In May, the city was praying for relief from yet another Job-like tragedy of Biblical proportions. A record Mississippi River flood shut down the casinos and the port and put 800 people out of work. Dozens of residents of homes and cabins between the levee and Lake Ferguson had to evacuate when the river spilled over its banks and advanced on the levee. People downtown could look up and see a casino boat riding the high water. The late Greenville author David L. Cohn once described Delta people as “fearing the wrath of God and the Mississippi River,” and here they were doing it all over again.

That industrial park off Highway 1, the one that used to cart out machinery and equipment by the loads, has fallen into fields of weeds and rusting hulks of what used to be, a victim of the move toward cheaper labor in Mexico, China, India and other places. Long stretches of discarded buildings and disconnected semi-trailers reveal the skeletons of what once helped power the local economy. The old Greenville Air Base, once home to 3,000 airmen and employees, is now home to an airport with only two daily commercial flights in and out.

Once, it dared to think of itself as different from the rest, the cream of the Delta. No more. More than a third of the city’s residents fall below the federal poverty line, and unemployment is soaring. Most of the scarce available jobs are minimum-wage.

Call it cotton’s curse.

The Delta was built on cotton, and Greenville was no exception. But the old cotton economy was built on a fragile base of credit, a vast amount of cheap labor and American dominance of cotton exports. In time, it all came crashing down. Greenville and the rest of the Delta have never been able to make lasting adjustments.

Grain now rules the Delta and cotton depends on government subsidies. The mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s and new herbicides in the early 1950s caused planters to jettison the huge workforce that picked and chopped their cotton. Thousands of unskilled black laborers were displaced. In time, many went north in search of jobs, but many others stayed, moving to southern towns and cities such as Greenville, where they became part of a seemingly permanent, welfare-dependent underclass. Cotton is no longer king, but as author Gene Dattel (Cotton and Race in the Making of America) puts it, “its ugly human legacy remains among a great many black citizens who are unprepared to function effectively in the modern world.” Some found work in the Greenville factories, but now those are gone, too, just as they are gone throughout the Delta, with rare exceptions.

The relative prosperity that allowed Greenville to thrive has evaporated. Of course, as Carter points out, the bulk of Greenville’s black population never really shared in that prosperity in the first place.

Thwarted for decades in its quest for political access, the city’s black majority finally took over the courthouse and city hall in 2003, inheriting a city on a downward slide. Since then, the white exodus has accelerated and the community has slid further down the long, ruinous road it has been on since the 1990s.

Dattel, who grew up in the Delta town of Ruleville, sees little hope that things will change. “With no jobs, AfricanAmericans and white people will

ELIZABETH BEAVER Greenville used to be a major player on the Mississippi River. Its waterfront was always busy, with towboats being built, boats coming and going and the U.S. Corps of Engineers busy assembling the armaments needed to keep the big river in its channel.

continue to move outside the Delta. I do not see anything on the horizon to alter that trend,” he says.

Benjy Nelken’s family has been in business in Greenville since before 1900. He’s seen the rise and fall of the city once dubbed the heart and soul of the Delta. Now he’s the owner of Nelken Realty and has overseen the creation of five minimuseums in Greenville.

“In 1960, a consultant came in and studied the community,” Nelken says. “It was projected in 1980 Greenville would have 80,000 people according to what it had done from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Greenville’s 2010 population estimate was 34,400, a 17.4 percent decline from the 2000 Census. At that rate, the city would lose 15,000 people from 2000 to 2025.

Frank Hester has been cutting hair at Palace Barber Shop in the same building downtown for more than 45 years. He remembers a time when you couldn’t find a parking spot on Washington Avenue. The customer he’s lathering up ate his first batch of grits in 1954 at Jim’s Café next door and never left to go back north.

If there’s one thing both these whitehaired men have noticed is missing, it’s a whole generation.

“Young families and educated people aren’t coming back,” Hester says. His customer grunts in agreement.

What’s more, white flight continues to grow as people, primarily the young, leave for better opportunities elsewhere. In 2000, only 25 percent of the city’s

ELIZABETH BEAVER

MARIANNA BRELAND ELIZABETH BEAVER A hopeful port director Tommy Hart says the port is experiencing a resurgence, with work underway on boats and an expanded terminal starting to draw more business.

population was white, a number that was sure to slide lower when the 2010 Census released detailed breakdowns by race. Significantly, white people control an estimated 60 percent of local businesses.

“We’ve got to start bringing jobs. That’s got to stop the bleeding,” Washington County Supervisor Al Rankins says. Otherwise, “we’re going to keep losing people.”

Could it be that Greenville’s success for the better part of the 20th century was all a house of cards? How did it go from regional shopping hub to a povertydominated city with a nearly dead downtown and working-class casinos milking the poor of their welfare checks?

A lot of things happened, most of them out of the Queen City’s control.

In 1965, Greenville Air Base shut down, a blow to the local housing market and retail sales. But even that couldn’t slow Greenville down.

Some say it really began with President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 grain embargo, a ban that hurt farmers and Greenville’s thriving towboat industry. It was part of a deadly, rapid-fire combination of embargo, truck deregulation and escalating fuel costs.

In the early ’70s, when business was flourishing, there were 25 towboat companies headquartered in Greenville. Just over the levee, there were always boats or barges in various stages of construction, with hundreds of welders working on them. The industry supported machine shops, steel providers — all sorts of spinoffs from the towboat industry. There were dozens of airplanes in the Greenville airport that the towing business used for ferrying parts and crews. At one point, Greenville firms owned 10 percent of all equipment on U.S. inland waterways, according to port Director Tommy Hart. An estimated 3,000 workers owed their jobs to the industry and those that served it.

Then it went from boom to bust. Today, the local industry is down to a couple of

“The community is ready to unite behind something but doesn’t know what it is.”

— Bob Boyd

towboat companies and several service industries. Hart estimates the marine industry here employs about 650 people. The mighty Mississippi that used to be Greenville’s highway has become a wall.

Some blame the 1994 enforcement of the North American Free Trade Agreement for the city’s economic decay. The agreement eliminated barriers to trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico and sent Greenville’s industry giants running for the southern border for even cheaper labor. Others went to India and China. Greenville, which had significantly more of these largely minimum-wage manufacturing jobs than other Delta towns, was left hurting.

There have been missed opportunities, too. Nelson Street was once a magnet for the best black entertainers, a bustling main street and entertainment district for the black community. Those who remember it at its peak say it could have become the Beale Street of the Delta. But it has become a neglected, dilapidated strip that draws drunks and crime.

There was talk of a downtown convention center or a museum a few years ago that never materialized. The waterfront, which could be a fishing mecca, a natural place for restaurants or a rest stop for towboats, is instead only a reminder of the city’s retreat.

When the black community finally consolidated political power and Heather McTeer was elected the first black mayor in 2003, some people thought things would change. But soon, some white businessmen were privately saying they felt isolated by the new administration, and some black leaders were suggesting that whites had disengaged. The gulf between the white and black communities widened.

That friction is exemplified in the “he said, she said” rumors that circulate. The mayor’s naysayers love to talk about her expensive bodyguards. McTeer says it’s just an unfounded rumor, that her protection comes from the police. Just as bad, say the critics.

There’s an underlying apprehension on both sides that blocks progress and opens rifts in the community.

Clarke Reed, the former GOP chairman and once one of the nation’s most powerful Republicans, thinks McTeer has ignored connections and has missed opportunities to heal the city.

“People like the mayor, they don’t want you,” Reed says. “I think she sees people like me as a threat more than a help.”

“She tried to promote racial harmony,” says Rankins, the, county supervisor, waving off the idea that racial discord within the political community is one of Greenville’s problems.

Catherine Gardner, director of community development at the Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, says she doesn’t see the community embracing McTeer’s vision for the city. She sees a lot of division within community leadership and thinks there must be unity on every level for Greenville to make a comeback.

“I think it’s past time we’ve bridged that,” says Gardner, who is running for circuit clerk. “I know we have people willing to step forward. I would like to see the mayor and council in harmony for the vision of this city.”

“What’s missing among blacks and whites is any really visionary leadership,” says Bob Boyd, a former newspaper reporter and a candidate for supervisor. “The community is ready to unite behind something but doesn’t know what it is.”

Andy Lack, CEO of Bloomberg’s multimedia affairs, has taken a special interest in Greenville. His greatgrandfather was the city’s third mayor, back when it was still a town on the cotton frontier. Now he makes frequent visits, drawn by the charm and courtesy of its citizens.

“Race is a lot of emotional baggage that isn’t helping,” Lack says. “No one’s talking. No one’s fixing that communication problem. Leadership is the first step.

“It’s a battle for the soul of Greenville.”

In conversations from city hall to beauty shops, Greenvillians talk about their weak tax base, the young people who won’t stay and the educated fleeing the city. But first they talk about their schools. If there’s one thing that everyone can agree on, it’s the dire need to revitalize the public education system. Though Greenville peacefully integrated the public schools, it could not stop white flight to private schools after the end of legal segregation.

Two-thirds of the public schools are at risk of failing. One is on academic watch. More than 97 percent of Greenville’s public school students are black. There have been episodes of unruly behavior that led to lockdowns and parental concerns about security. It’s hard to imagine much industry or new blood willing to come to a city whose schools are both de facto segregated and performing poorly.

“I thought that by the year 2010, after several generations of integration, it would have panned out and it would’ve been a little better at this point in time,” Nelken says. “But it’s gotten worse.

“The fact that we’ve got the two school systems has something to do with it. If we had one unified school system united

ELIZABETH BEAVER The Greenville Renaissance Scholars program offers middle schoolers a head start in the college game, broadening their horizons and preparing them for the application stage to come in high school.

together it would be better, but it’s just not the way it is. And I don’t see any sign of that changing.”

Some people blame a lack of consistent leadership for the town’s education woes. A hyperactive quality has taken over the city’s quest to try to improve the district. Teacher after teacher makes sure to point out the constant hiring of new administrations, year after year. And every new principal and every new superintendent brings a different mission, a different attitude, a different structure. Since the latest superintendent, Harvey Franklin, took over, one school has climbed off the failing list, and local leaders hope that maybe now the whole district can settle down and improve.

Others point to another issue as the root of the problem. When Aid to Families With Dependent Children — a critical part of the nation’s welfare system — started, it was not allowed to go to homes with a man in the house. The result was an unintended blow to the black family — poor, unwed mothers supporting children off checks from the government, indirectly producing an epidemic of teenage pregnancies as too many daughters followed suit. Four decades later, the system has yielded a vicious cycle of single-mother households and generations of high school dropouts. Nearly one-fourth of Greenville students don’t finish high school. Children are behind when they first arrive at school, bearing the scars of problems at home that too often carry over into the classroom.

These are entrenched social problems and very hard to change.

But Greenville is a place where people dream. And there are bright spots in the system, people and organizations that have started chipping away at problems as best they can.

The private Catholic school St. Joseph provides an example of integrated education that seems to be working. It contains the only heterogeneous mixture in Greenville’s dual education system — 40 percent of its students are black. But St. Joseph charges tuition and most of its students come from middle- and uppermiddle-class families.

Teach for America has placed 29 instructors in Greenville public schools, planting a community of 20-somethings determined to change things.

That old liberal element is still there, coursing through social events, community organizations and educational programs. There are people like Hodding Carter’s daughter Margaret Carter Joseph and Mary Hardy, a white woman and black woman working to improve the education of children through the Greenville Renaissance Scholars program. It is an after-school and summer program for middle school students — more than 40 this summer — who focus on academic enrichment and college readiness. The program is too young to measure its effectiveness at getting kids into college, but if their enthusiasm is any indication, progress is being made.

Larry Jones, executive director of the Delta Economic Development Center in Greenville, says the organization is implementing eight initiatives designed to pump life back into Greenville.

In November, voters will decide whether to enact a tax on hotel beds to help finance a multimillion-dollar sportsplex, a huge recreation complex that would provide activities for the youth and probably draw from surrounding communities as well. With its fields and courts, it would be an ideal place to hold regional tournaments, which would mean parents and kids eating at restaurants and perhaps staying in hotel rooms.

Until the Mississippi River flood shut it down for two months, the local port was experiencing a comeback of sorts fed by the market for scrap metal, shipments

of grain and rising fuel prices that make river transportation more competitive. In February, the port moved 300 railcars of material, more than it shipped in all of the previous year. It is nothing like what the port once moved, but it is something.

“There is a light under a bushel in the Greenville port,” says Boyd, the former DD-T reporter. He thinks steel can move down the river from the likes of Pittsburgh and be loaded aboard trucks at Greenville. He said plastic is another product that could bring the port business.

Betty Lynn Cameron is the director of Main Street Greenville, an organization devoted to the revitalization of downtown. She’s determined that it once again become the heart of the city and not an eyesore. Ken Dowes, a 1959 graduate of Greenville High School, offered $50,000 of his own money to help clean up Greenville. He asked only that people raise enough to match his cash. Cameron and her crew raised the money in 60 days.

Now, two years later, Main Street Greenville is allocating money in the name of the Greenville Challenge. Businesses can apply for money to improve the looks of their storefronts.

Main Street is also planting yellow daffodils downtown, trying to use cosmetic touches to brighten the place. The hope is that as the appearance improves, business will pick up. Already, Cameron says, there is talk of a new restaurant and printing shop opening downtown.

“It’s attitude. Once we get the attitude …” Cameron trails off, looking at the massive antebellum style Elks Club building across the street. Once reminiscent of Greenville’s glory, it’s now a cracked veneer of vines and a crumbling colonnade, a reminder of how far Cameron has to go.

“Our saving grace is us,” she says, nodding to herself.

Chuck Jordan, a retired banker running for mayor in the December election, also says the city’s solution lies in the hands and minds of its people.

“I’m convinced if we could change the attitudes, defeat the malaise that’s enveloped our community, we could reach the heights we want,” Jordan says.

Other leaders of the community — a hopeful councilwoman, a former reporter, a prominent businessman — talk about changing the attitude, too. The problem, they say, is that people can’t let go of the past to move into the future. People remember Greenville how it was — “It looked like a Norman Rockwell painting,” one shop owner laments — and become bitter about how it is. They grumble and gripe, reliving the glory days without offering solutions to fix their fate.

This is exactly the kind of attitude people like Jordan and the visitors bureau’s Gardner want to shake.

“Greenville was guided by this mythical notion that we were different,” says Hodding Carter, now a professor at the University of North Carolina. “And because of this horizon, we were different.” The place, he insists, is not beyond hope.

The visitors bureau and Main Street Greenville have begun distributing “I Believe in Greenville” bumper stickers in hopes they will act as a small beacon of hope for those driving behind vehicles on U.S. 82 and Highway 1.

Greenville is caught in a cyclical structural conundrum. It needs jobs badly. It needs money from industry to keep young people from fleeing the city. But to attract industry, it needs an educated workforce. To develop an educated workforce, it needs training and a productive education system. It needs the kind of leadership that can get black and white working together to build a progressive city without two cultures colliding.

These are tough obstacles. But Greenville has a knack for bouncing back from disasters. It’s been doing it ever since Charles Percy began reclaiming land from the wild river in the mid-19th century.

There’s virtually no history in the Delta preceding the Civil War. It was still in the early stages of being settled. Then when the Northern Army came through on the way to Vicksburg, gunboats shelled Greenville and soldiers burned its homes and its stores. It built back.

In 1874, much of the town burned again. It bounced back.

By 1878, the city had grown to around 2,000 residents. Then a deadly yellow fever epidemic wiped out one-third of the population. It recovered.

A few decades later, the 1927 flood left the city inundated for months. It dried out and slowly regained its footing.

The airbase closed in 1965, but the city recovered again, eventually building an agricultural-industrial-business base that was the envy of the Delta. Then the grain embargo, fuel tax and NAFTA contributed to the current downslide, one that has been much more difficult to reverse. Today, the hospital is the biggest employer in town and federal transfer payments — welfare — are the biggest single source of personal income.

No wonder that people were on edge when the river rose ominously to a record crest in the spring. Fortunately, the Mississippi stopped rising and the levee held.

The river crisis is gone, but Greenville’s larger crisis remains. There appears to be no quick cure. Cities across America have crumbled in the face of lesser problems. One thing’s certain: If Greenville can’t fix its schools, it’ll be hard to rebuild any semblance of what once was.

Yet, as many here point out, Greenville has always thought of itself as different. What’s almost as stunning as the town’s decline and uncertain future is that apostles of hope remain. Mindful of the city’s phoenix-like tendencies, they search for a way out, a way back.

They, at least, have not lost hope.

Considering the city’s past, would you bet against them?