The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity.

For a good part of the twentieth century, the Mississippi Delta has often stood for the South. Whenever journalists needed to conjure an image of the South in its most oppressive and racist form, they turned to the Delta. And there were plenty of planters and their minions to oblige them. Who could ever forget the post-World War II stories of Emmett Till's murder, the White Citizens' Council's defiance of federal laws, and such leaders as Senator James Eastland who lorded over a government subsidized plantation, or the violence of Freedom Summer? Yet the challenges of oppression also called forth survival strategies from African Americans, who created their own institutions, culture, and leaders. Thus, the Delta was also home to the African American town of Mound Bayou, gave birth to the Blues, and produced some of the most courageous and memorable leaders in American history--Fannie Lou Hamer, Mae Bertha Carter, Annie Devine, Unita Blackwell, Victoria Gray Adams, to name only a few.(1)

Scholars have endorsed the portrayal of the Delta as the essence of the South. In 1935, sociologist Rupert Vance labeled the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta the "Deepest South"--a region that embodied the extreme contrasts of the South with its "cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed" plantation owners who ruled over vast fields worked by African American sharecroppers and day laborers. He was struck by the mansions and the manners of this "aristocracy" that was "affable and courteous with equals, commanding and forceful with inferiors," while keeping black people at the "lowest level in America."(2)

James C. Cobb seeks to explain the roots of this complex and contradictory regional identity in his sweeping history of the Mississippi Delta from its earliest beginnings to the present. His topics reveal the scope of the Delta's history, ranging from political and economic developments to chapters on the Blues and Mississippi writers. Combining archival work with the secondary literature, Cobb offers the first attempt to study the entire history of the Delta. He sees the story of this "most southern place on earth" as a microcosm for understanding "in sharply defined geographical miniature the rich history and culture of the Deep South." The Delta that emerged from his inquiries, however, "was no mere isolated backwater where time stood still while southerness stood fast. Indeed, many of the major economic, political, and social forces that have swept across the American landscape during the past 150 years have actually converged in the Mississippi Delta". He thus challenges the image of a region resistant to change, and attempts to study "the South's socio-economic and cultural characteristics within the context of its interaction with, rather than its isolation from, the larger national and global setting." From this perspective, he argues, "the Delta became a part of the world rather than a world apart, a place where questions about the heart and soul of a region …