27 minute read
IN SEARCH OF HOPE Maggie Day
In Search of Hope
CHELSEA CAVENY Greenville has room for recreation at and near Warfield Point on the Big Muddy, and it still would love to resurrect its once booming towboat and boating-building industry.
— Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables “t he word which God has written on the brow of every man is Hope.”
BY MAGGIE DAY
It would be easy to give up on Greenville.
People have been doing it for almost 20 years.
In 1990, ‘The Queen City of the Delta’ boasted a population just over 45,000. But since then, nearly 25 percent of its citizens have packed up and left. Greenville now stands at a shriveled 34,400, its lowest population since the 1950s.
You can’t blame them for leaving. Thousands of jobs disappeared. Since 1990, numerous factories have left Greenville. Unemployment has soared. A third of the population remains mired in poverty. Much of Washington Avenue is boarded up. Schools remain hopelessly de facto segregated atop a racial and political fault line.
These are daunting obstacles for any city.
But make no mistake. Greenville is not bereft of hope.
Just ask former Greenville newspaper editor Hodding Carter III, who left here in the 1970s, when times were good.
“We rose above the [1927] Mississippi River flood. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again,” he said.
Carter is not alone. A steady drumbeat of hope still pulses through Greenville. People are desperate to stop the bleeding, to find some semblance of economic growth, to carve out at least a piece of what the city used to be.
— Cissy Foote Anklam
Some have already given up. But others are talking of ways to get up off the mat and do something – special after school programs for promising kids, an attempt to revitalize a huge swath of deteriorating neighborhoods near the hospital, ways to increase tourism by capitalizing on the blues or the lakefront, beautifying downtown, providing a regional recreational facility and more.
Most agree on one thing – “you’ve got to capitalize on what you have,” as City Engineer Lorenzo Anderson put it.
And Greenville still has some things to work with. After all, it remains the largest city in the Delta, home to the region’s only real shopping mall and a gleaming new bridge that provides easy access to Arkansas. And Greenville sits smack on America’s biggest highway – the Mississippi River.
The city hasn’t capitalized on the river much since the local towboat industry collapsed back in the 1980s, but the potential is there. Rising fuel prices, the growth of grain crops, and a burgeoning scrap steel market are already breathing new life into the business.
“When gas prices go up, it’s good for us,” said Tommy Hart, the port director and former president of the Economic Development Council. “This is the most efficient method of transportation, and other communities don’t have this. As far as the towboat industry coming back, it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when.”
It’s a far cry from the “Million Dollar Mile,” the port’s nickname when Greenville was known as “Towboat Capital of the World,” but the port’s size has doubled in the past three years and so has the amount of cargo it handles. Mississippi Marine is building a towboat, something that used to happen all the time but now is cause for celebration.
Greenville is home to Delta Regional Medical Center and its 1,200 jobs, the largest employer in the county. The most comprehensive health care site in the Delta, it treats people from seven counties in a 100-mile radius. The city has the only movie theater for miles around, and the parking lot is often dotted with license tags from other counties and Arkansas. While not the shopping magnet it used to be, the same license tag effect can be seen out on Highway 1 at Lowe’s, Home Depot, Belk and J.C. Penny.
But with the Delta shriveling with each passing year, Greenville needs more than this to survive. It needs an edge.
For ideas, Greenville need look no further than thirty miles down the road in Indianola. A town with less than one-third the population of Greenville, Indianola could easily have slipped off the map. But black and white leaders got together, raised millions in seed money to demonstrate commitment, then obtained grants that enabled them to build a B.B. King Museum. It is honest: displays on the civil rights era capture the struggles of black people. It is colorful: a slick movie that traces the story of King’s rise from a plantation shack to the pinnacle of the blues industry. It is sophisticated: Smithsonian-style displays that draw tourists from as far away as England and Japan.
If little Indianola can capitalize on its past and community solidarity, why not Greenville?
TOURISM “The key to success in the Delta is that we have our cultural history,” said McKenzie Stroh, executive director of the Greenville Arts Council.
Seeds of hope can be found in the colorful mini-museums scattered throughout the town, ranging from museums on the 1927 Mississippi River flood to the Jewish population. The artifacts and memorabilia are just as eclectic as their curator, the city’s selfappointed historian, Benjy Nelken. But none are big enough to secure large numbers of visitors or anchor Greenville as a tourist destination. As it stands, the more scattered the museums, the more scattered the visitors.
But if Clarksdale and Indianola can draw tourists with their Blues and B.B. King museums, why couldn’t Greenville do the same with a single, comprehensive Delta Museum or Mississippi River Museum? If such a project were built downtown, on or near the scenic waterfront, glimpses into the city’s past could be the honey to lure tourists downtown and keep them hooked, spending precious dollars on surrounding retailers.
“A cultural center or museum located in
MIRIAM TAYLOR A reincarnation of the legendary Flowing Fountain is supposed to open this fall. Maybe Greenville can latch onto the burgeoning blues tourism in the Delta and revive some of Nelson Street’s old luster.
CAIN MADDEN If the casinos make room on the waterfront, it would make a great home for a convention center, museum or other tourist attraction, offering fabulous views of Lake Ferguson and, potentially, rides on the river.
Greenville would not only reap economic benefits, but would expand the brand of the Mississippi Delta to reach beyond its musical legacy and bring to light the many other cultural and historic aspects of the this rich and evocative region,” said Cissy Foote Anklam, president of the Arlington, Va.-based Museum Concepts, who helped with the B.B. King Museum project.
“Putting aside the economic argument, I hope that the folks and civic leaders of Greenville will seize the opportunity to build a cultural attraction that will once again make the city a must visit destination for travelers near and far - as she holds some of the south’s richest and most compelling narrative,” Anklam said.
As Mississippi has found in its push for cultural tourism, nonprofit arts and cultural attractions, when marketed and run correctly, can be economic drivers in a community. They are a growth industry that supports jobs and generates government revenue and tourism dollars.
The July 2010 Delta Business Journal reported that “while overall tourism spending in Mississippi was down seven percent in fiscal 2009, visitor spending in Sunflower County — home to the one of the state’s biggest blues attractions, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — was up 12.5 percent to $12.43 million.”
On the national level, the arts and cultural industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year — $63.1 billion in spending by organizations and an additional $103.1 billion in eventrelated spending by audiences, according to the most recent report of Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audience. THE WATERFRONT AND CASINOS
“We’re going to have something over here on the Mississippi River to bring people over here from the B.B. King Museum and … spend some money in a restaurant and at the hotel,” said Larry Jones, executive director of the Delta Economic Development Center.
Lake Ferguson sits just over the levee at the foot of Main Street, so close to downtown that you could easily throw a baseball into the water from the intersection of Main and Walnut. Yet, the scenic view goes wasted except for the glimpse folks get of it as they head into two casinos that take up most of the viewing area.
These are not the massive, glittering Harrah’s of northern neighbor Tunica or the hulking monoliths anchored off the Gulf Coast. These are decidedly working class facades of economic hope for impoverished locals, storm drains for their earnings that already aren’t enough. Inside, you’ll find row upon row of mindless seduction in the form of slot machines. It’s all about haphazardly trying to win your paycheck back.
There is talk of the casinos consolidating into just one, leaving more space on the lakefront – and another opportunity for economic development. “People everywhere,” said Larry Jones, “love the water.”
Here is prime lakefront that could be used for a convention center, or an attraction offering rides on the lake or the mighty Mississippi itself, or something else. The point is, Greenville’s legacy as a river town offers opportunity, just as B.B. King’s legacy did for Indianola. HUNTING AND FISHING
With some strong marketing, the river and the abundant lakes of Washington County might be used to lure more hunters and fishermen, who would in turn bring business to local restaurants and motels. Parts of southeast Arkansas have already capitalized on the area’s superb duck hunting, but Greenville could give them a run for their money.
Hundreds already flock to Greenville for boating and fishing tournaments on Lake Ferguson and Lake Washington.
Lake Ferguson, an oxbow, is known for being one of the best places to bass fish in the whole state. The county’s woods are a prime spot for hunting white tailed deer. A push to promote and market Greenville as a major hunting and fishing destination, “a sportsman’s paradise,” could draw from other parts of the South.
RECREATION
Greenville could also potentially lead the Delta in sports facilities with a $20 million sportsplex. The sportsplex, expected to cover an expansive 95 acres, would be a state-of-the-art multipurpose sports complex near the Washington County Convention Center off U.S. 82 east. Complete with three baseball complexes of five diamonds each, the sportsplex would become reality if Washington County voters agree on Nov. 2 to a two per cent sales tax on hotel rooms.
CLEAR WATER
Greenville could also soon erase the stigma of brown water. Mayor Heather McTeer crusaded for federal help to clear the water of its dingy brown tint. If an $18 million grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is matched by $4.5 million from the city, six of eight wells within the city limits would be treated and, the city says, the water will be clear for the first time in decades. Though critics doubt it, McTeer devoutly believes that once the water is clear, industry and business will be more likely to consider Greenville. THE BLUES
Tourists flock to Clarksdale and Indianola to sample the blues in the land from whence it sprang. In Clarksdale, they even throw down $150 a night to stay in refurbished, air-conditioned sharecropper cabins at the Shackup Inn.
Greenville’s Nelson Street was once a hotbed of blues music but has fallen on hard times. There is an effort to cultivate an entertainment district of clubs along one block of Walnut Street next to the levee. A coordinated effort linking and marketing Walnut and Nelson might pay off with more blues tourists. But much work needs to be done to assure crimeplagued Nelson is safe. And a city blues effort would need an edge of some sort, an angle that the city could market to signal to tourists why Greenville is worth a blues stopover along with Clarksdale and Indianola.
INDIAN MOUNDS The Winterville Mounds attraction on U.S. 1 south of the city is a fascinating exploration of the mysterious mound builders who once populated this part of the Delta. If Greenville can get other attractions off the ground, it could throw in tours of the mounds and ferry tourists out there for lectures and a stroll atop one of the highest points in the Delta.
This is the stuff of dreams. But cities that dream sometimes hit the jackpot.
In the Delta, a region still staggering from the collapse of the old plantation economy, hope must always be grounded in reality. Here, there is a sense that even if Greenville finds tourist attractions, repairs downtown and reclaims some of its past glory, it will be difficult to truly blossom unless it finds a way to deal with the ageold dilemma of race and de facto school segregation. All these years after Brown v. Board of Education, the troubled public schools are more than 97 percent black and the private schools, with the exception of St. Joseph (40 percent black), are heavily white. That one dilemma makes it all the more difficult to attract new industry, businesses, residents.
But even in the tricky arena of race, there is hope. Greenville remains arguably the most integrated city in the Delta with civic and country clubs, cultural and social events that help bridge the gap between races.
State and national educational organizations are rapidly multiplying their presence in the Delta. Mississippi Teachers Corps and Teach for America have established and strengthened enormous efforts within the past five years to help public schools get off “failing” lists.
Many Greenvillians think it comes down to ‘an attitude problem’. Slowly attacking this mindset is a dwindling, but nevertheless stubbornly persistent band of optimists who keep dreaming, keep planning, and keep working with small, but ambitious strides to improve things. They often see hope where others see hopelessness.
There is no lack of effort in other quarters as well.
There is hope in Margaret Carter Joseph, who brought her Harvard degree back home to better the community through an after-school program called Greenville Renaissance Scholars, providing students with supplemental education and a creative after-school and summertime outlet.
There is hope in Cliff Whitley’s MACE programs, some of which take troubled teens and high-school dropouts and train them for jobs and leadership positions.
There is hope in the likes of 24-year-old Mackenzie Stroh, executive director at the Greenville Arts Council, who is promoting a comeback of the arts, as well as the return of her generation to the city for leadership positions.
There is hope in George Miles’ LISC initiative that hopes to remake beaten down neighborhoods by mobilizing the residents. He envisions residents organizing into groups passionate about ridding their streets of crime, improving houses and yards and building community centers. The idea is to help the residents use LISC’s access to loans and grants and expertise and let them remake their neighborhoods.
After all, who better to create hope in Greenville than its citizens? It is Greenvillians’ spirit of reinvention that keeps the city moving.
“We have survived flood, fire and famine,” says Mayor Heather McTeer. “To even question whether there is hope shows no faith in our city and all that has already been done. It is our destiny.”
Climbing the Ladder
BY N OR M AN SE AW R IGHT
o one could ever accuse Mayor Heather McTeer of lacking ambition. In 2003, at the age of 27, she left a lucrative law career and got elected the first black mayor and first female mayor of Greenville. Now, after two terms leading the state’s eighth largest city, she is running for Congress against Bennie Thompson, 63, a powerful, entrenched incumbent in a district that sprawls all the way from the Delta to Jackson. NORMAN SEAWRIGHT Heather McTeer became Greenville’s first black mayor at the age of 27. n
Mayor Heather McTeer has spent eight years as Greenville’s first black mayor. Now she wants to tackle Congress.
Thompson, who was sitting on a $1.7 million campaign treasury in early summer, has been in Congress for 18 years, the longest of Mississippi’s U.S. House delegation.
Why tackle Thompson? “I think we could do a little bit better than we are doing right now. When I look at places that are in the most need, the place that needs help the most is the Second District,” said McTeer, who said she wants to “see some progress in our area.”
McTeer is used to challenges.
The first thing she learned in office: Politics is harsh.
After getting elected, she endured threats and slurs. She was criticized for championing an expensive project to get the brown stain out of the city’s drinking water. She was attacked for questioning why some public school teachers had their children in private schools. And she discovered that she had inherited a sizeable deficit.
Along the way, she solved the deficit, secured millions from the federal government for a system to clear up the water and used bond money to start fixing neighborhood streets.
But it was never easy.
“There was a lot of doubt among citizens and employees as to what I could do,” McTeer said. “I had two employees who couldn’t work for me. Couldn’t work for a woman. One couldn’t work for a ‘little girl.’ That’s how I was viewed. I was called all types of derogatory names that you could imagine.” In fact, she said, the biggest disappointment she faced was learning that people she thought highly of turned out to be completely different than she expected.
But, calling herself “the ultimate optimist,” McTeer set out to tackle the city’s long list of problems. She had the city hire a CFO, who is present at every city council meeting, to try to ensure that money is used as efficiently as possible.
“I’m proud today that we don’t have to do what we had to do seven years ago, which was the accounts payable clerk would come in, and sit in the chair with a box of checks and how much money was in the account, and she and I would sit there and figure out who to pay,” McTeer said.
For this, McTeer, a graduate of Tulane Law School, left a promising six-figure law practice. That 2003 Mercedes didn’t come from her mayoral salary of roughly $50,000 a year.
McTeer’s election helped give blacks control of city hall in addition to the courthouse for the first time, making her a symbol of change. Just how much things have changed can be seen in the photos of Greenville’s past mayors on the wall outside her office. They are all white.
Sitting in her office, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of plaques and pictures. Here she is chairing a national advisory committee for the Environmental Protection Agency. There, she is president of the National Conference of Black Mayors. There is a picture of her with President Obama and his family. Numerous civic and church awards and the prominent letters of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority leave no doubt that she takes pride in everything she is involved in.
As the daughter of civil rights attorney and photographer Victor McTeer, and retired teacher Mercidees McTeer, she was schooled on civil rights and equality as a child. Her parents sent her to public school, and mandated that she be in the Girl Scouts. So important to her is family that, after she took office, she took her grandmother to meet President Barack Obama, a fellow Democrat, at the White House for a Christmas event.
“My parents didn’t want us to feel like we were ‘running away,’ but that we were actually a part and could be leaders in our schools. The things I remember most are, when we came home from school, my mom and dad put a basketball goal in the front yard. So we had kids from Clay Street and everywhere else in the front yard, on Main, playing ball. It would be twenty boys out in the front yard. We never felt like we were above or below anyone.”
She gained an interest in politics at an early age. Her father was active in political causes adn took her to a rally in Indianola when she was around 9 or 10.
While in law school, she interned for Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks. After graduating from Spelman
College, McTeer interned as a legislative aide in Georgia’s State Assembly, where she did everything from getting coffee to going to meetings on behalf of the senator.
“I was a legislative aide for Sen. Donzella James. I think we were paid something like $50 a week. I thought my senator, initially, just hated me. I really did,” said McTeer. “She was a kind woman, but she was very serious about what she did, and there was a reason for that. She was an adamant member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving because, the year before, she lost her son to a drunk driver. Finally, one day, she was on the floor. There was a particular piece of legislation that she had been working on. She called me down…to the floor of the Senate … When I got there, she said, ‘I’m getting ready to speak on this particular topic. Write the speech.’”
McTeer wrote the speech from the back of the Senate chamber on a legal pad. She figured it would be her last day, since the senator was so hard on her.
“She read what I wrote, line for line. When we got back, she said to me, ‘The reason that I did that is because I knew you could do it.’”
When McTeer was first elected mayor, defeating a veteran white incumbent, she jumped into several longstanding community issues.
One of the first items on her agenda was Washington Avenue, which at that was a one-way serpentine road. Despite criticism from some downtown advocates, she straightened out the road and made it a two-way street, as it was originally constructed. Now, she said, people leaving the casinos over the levee don’t have to drive way up Main Street and circle back to shop on a one-way Washington Avenue. They just drive straight up Washington itself.
“When I was running for office, the thing I heard over and over from people was that neighborhood streets had been neglected. Some hadn’t been fixed in 50 years,” she said. McTeer used $5 million in bonds to tackle neighborhood streets first, smoothing out washboard roads. Now the city is embarking on a separate project to tackle Washington Avenue, including the bumpy, pothole-laden section at the entrance to downtown.
It always galled her that visitors to Greenville would check into a hotel, go to their rooms and discover brown water flowing from the faucet. It’s impossible to ignore. The brown discoloration is an effect produced by water seeping through cypress roots. It isn’t harmful, and it has the added benefits of being soft and mineral-rich. But McTeer is certain that visitors may ignore the benefits and be stuck on the color.
“You think about your tourists. When you go into a restaurant, and you ask for a glass of water, what would you do if they brought you a glass of brown water?” She believes that cleaning up the water will help improve the city’s image and might even make it easier to recruit business and industry. Her crusade to clear up the water eventually was featured in a story in The Washington Post.
With the help of U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., she pried money out of the U.S. Corps of Engineers for a project to clear up the water. Greenville has to match it with about $4.5 million and the mayor insists that it will get done.
Ask her about her greatest challenge as mayor and McTeer will tell you that she can always improve communication with people. She wants to learn to listen more and to listen better.
Sometimes, she said, it can be tough to deliver bad news. For example, some water meters have been misreporting the amount of water used, sometimes reporting too much, sometimes too little. The city is taking steps to fix them, but even that creates problems. “You have to be careful about how you communicate that,” she said. “How do you tell the little old lady on fixed income who has been paying $25 a week for water that the meter was wrong and now she has to pay $45?”
McTeer sees the lakefront casinos she inherited, for better or worse, as part of the community. They have brought some social problems, but they have also brought money into the city budget.
“Since they are in the community, I think it is important that we have an effective partnership to the extent that we can,” she said. “In some ways, have they hurt? Yes. I remember there being a lot of issues, especially from the faith-
NORMAN SEAWRIGHT McTeer’s ascendance to the mayor’s office helped give blacks political control of city hall in addition to the courthouse for the first time, making her a clear symbol of change.
based community, and a lot of speakers talking about what this would do to our community, and it being a negative impact on the community. Either way, the decision was made to allow casinos. If I had to do it, I would not have formed the contracts in those fashions. I don’t think the city got the benefit out of the initial agreements with the casinos that they could have. With that said, hindsight is always 20/20.”
When she entered office, she stopped the use of casino-generated revenue in the general fund. McTeer wanted the city to be in a position where, if all the casinos left, the city would survive.
McTeer’s office is a busy world. Conversations with the mayor are frequently interrupted by citizens coming in to express their discontent about something in the town, or by important phone calls that require her to shoo you out of the office.
She is often so busy that she forgets to eat. Her staff all but forces her to slow down long enough to gobble a quick lunch. Aside from her work in city hall, McTeer makes sure to participate in events around town. The morning of St. Patrick’s Day, she came to work wearing a green sweater. She spilled something on it, so she handed her credit card to her secretary and sent her out to go buy
another one.
“Being the mayor, you’re on the ground level, and so there is a very intimate communication that we have with our constituents. It has been a definite journey and experience in learning the community. I’m from Greenville, so I always thought I really knew Greenville,” she said.
Knowing Greenville also entails knowing its history. Because white politicians and business leaders had dominated Greenville until McTeer’s election, some blacks still harbor negative feelings toward white people. At the same time, some white people feel marginalized or left out of critical decisions.
“You have some African Americans who think you should do to white folks everything white folks did to you. I don’t agree with that,” said McTeer.
She said no one group should be cut out of community decisions. “We need to set priorities and do the projects that are needed the most, first, regardless of whether they are in the white or black community,” she said.
Critics complain that the city pays for expensive bodyguards to protect her. She says it’s a misunderstanding, and a bigger issue than it should be. On one occasion, men who were mistaken for bodyguards were simply her brother and cousin, in town to see a movie. At other times, men from the Nation of Islam showed up at public events and stayed near her, offering protection.
She said police officers trained in “executive protection” not only ensure her safety, but are also assigned to protect any high-profile official that may visit Greenville.
McTeer endured more criticism when, at a school convocation, she challenged public school teachers who were sending their children to private schools.
“I caught a lot of flak for this because I said two things,” she said. “I said, if you’re a teacher for Greenville public schools, it was something to the effect of, you should be able to teach your own children. Why
NORMAN SEAWRIGHT Threats trickled in to city hall when McTeer was first elected.
are you a teacher for Greenville public schools and your kids go to private school? There was a whole newspaper editorial write-up, letters to the editor about how dare I trash teachers about where their kids go to school.
McTeer feels strongly about trying to build future leaders among today’s youth. That’s why she expanded from 12 to 60 the Mayor’s Youth Council created by her predecessor, in which children from both public and private schools meet with her to discuss life in their respective schools. If children of different backgrounds get to know each other, she said, they are less likely to harbor prejudice later in life.
Through Youth Council, she said, children of different races and backgrounds have the opportunity to build meaningful relationships that bring them into each other’s worlds. She has sponsored a school switch, where a child from a public school is paired with a child from a private school, and throughout the week, they each spend two days at the other’s school, attending classes and events together. McTeer gave them each a journal, and they returned with new insights about worlds that were once foreign to them.
What she got back in those journals made all the struggles of office worthwhile.
“They are my babies,” she said. “They wrote some of the most wonderful pieces about how, ultimately, they discovered that all of them were just alike. And it caused them to begin to question, ‘Why aren’t we just all together?’ and that’s where I say I think we have to really invest in our kids. They’re going to be the next generation of policymakers, of organizers, of people who implement these programs to take us into the future.
“My public school kids were saying, ‘Mayor McTeer, I went over to the private school and they had a Spanish test and I took it, and guess what? I made an A!’ It broke the stereotype of thinking that the private schools were so much more advanced than the public schools.”
Adults, who carry a lot of baggage stemming from their life experiences, are harder to change, she said.
She described how some white people have come to her office “and shut the door and closed the blinds” and said they would like to send their children to public school, but fear that their child “would be the only white child, a minority.
“We’ve got to get over that and have these hard conversations,” she said.
“I am very perceptive. I know there are portions of the population that I am not popular with,” she said. “I know there is hurt and pain and anger from years of conflict and stress. Maybe if we had known each other as kids, we would have been great friends.”
“You know,” she said, “being in office can sometimes be a lonely place. It’s a position where you can take a lot of criticism.” When that happens, she said, “it probably means you are doing something right.”
