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 (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" ("Southern" in the sense of "characteristic of its region, the American South"), because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history. It is long and across at its widest point, encompassing about , 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 slaves, who composed the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.
As the riverfront areas were developed first and railroads were slow to be constructed, most of the bottomlands in the Delta were undeveloped, even after the Civil War. Both black and White migrants flowed into Mississippi, using their labor to clear land and sell timber in order to buy land. By the end of the 19th century, black farmers made up two-thirds of the independent farmers in the Mississippi Delta.
In 1890, the white-dominated state legislature passed a new state constitution effectively disenfranchising most blacks in the state. In the next three decades, most blacks lost their lands due to tight credit and political oppression. African Americans had to resort to sharecropping and tenant farming to survive. Their political exclusion was maintained by the whites until after the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
The majority of residents in several counties in the region are still black, although more than 400,000 African Americans left the state during the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century, moving to Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western industrial cities.
As the agricultural economy does not support many jobs or businesses, the region has attempted to diversify. Lumbering is important and new crops such as soybeans have been cultivated in the area by the largest industrial farmers.
At times, the region has suffered heavy flooding from the Mississippi River, notably in 1927 and 2011.
Geography
Despite the name, this region is not the delta of the Mississippi River. The shifting river delta at the mouth of the Mississippi on the Gulf Coast lies some 300 miles south of this area, and is referred to as the Mississippi River Delta. Rather, the Mississippi Delta is part of an alluvial plain, created by regular flooding of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers over thousands of years. The climate is humid subtropical, with short mild winters, and long, hot and wet summers.
The land is flat and contains some of the most fertile soil in the world. It is two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, encompassing approximately 4,415,000 acres, or, some 7,000 square miles of alluvial floodplain. On the east, it is bounded by bluffs extending beyond the Yazoo River.
The Delta includes all or part of the following counties: Washington, Western DeSoto, Humphreys, Carroll, Issaquena, Western Panola, Quitman, Bolivar, Coahoma, Leflore, Sunflower, Sharkey, Tate, Tunica, Tallahatchie, Western Holmes, Western Yazoo, Western Grenada, and Warren.
Demographics
In the 21st century, about one-third of Mississippi's African American population resides in the Delta, which has many black-majority state legislative districts. Much of the Delta is included in Mississippi's 2nd congressional district, represented by Democrat Bennie Thompson.
Chinese began settling in Bolivar County and other Delta counties as plantation workers in the 1870s, though most Delta Chinese families migrated to the state between the 1900s and 1930s. Most Chinese immigrants worked to leave the fields, becoming merchants in the small rural towns. As these have declined, along with other Delta residents ethnic Chinese have moved to cities or other states. Their descendants represent most of the ethnic Asian residents of the Delta recorded in censuses. While many Chinese have left the Delta, their population has increased in the state.