Gregory's ServerThe Delta, for all its decline, was still a crossroads. It was where the great contradictions of America played out—between wealth and poverty, freedom and oppression, innovation and exclusion.
Image: Shine and Sam Carr. Dundee, Miss. 2001.
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The machines may have taken the work, the cotton may have faded into memory, but the Delta remains—its story etched into the soil, its music carried far far beyond its borders in the music and history of its people. Image: Wolcott, Marion Post, photographer. Saturday afternoon, Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi. Mississippi Clarksdale United States Mississippi Delta, 1939. Fall?. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017755112/. 22/25 |
It was a place where the nation’s promises had been both made and broken, where the labor of Black Americans had built the foundation of a modern economy and reshaped the cultural and industrial fabric of the North. The cultural residue of the Delta, its intangible inheritance, lingered even as its fields emptied.
Image: Wolcott, Marion Post. Some of the Negroes watching itinerant salesman selling goods from his truck in the center of town on Saturday afternoon, Belzoni, 1939. Oct.
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