Life in the Mississippi Delta

Warm Up: Review what life was like during the Jim Crow Era. Write one or two sentences. Mr. Wilks will pick someone to share.

In this lesson you will take an imagined road trip through Mississippi to visit two sites where you will learn about African-American life in the South in the early part of the 20th century, and how that life was reflected in Country Blues music.

You will visit two stations where you will examine a series of artifacts including film clips, photographs, visual art, and readings.

In groups, we will answer a series of questions about these artifacts.

The first questions will come from your previous knowledge in social studies class.

·    Station 1: Yazoo City in the Mississippi Delta

 https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7988103,-90.5346978,9.75z. 

Poor southerners, black and white alike, lived in the shadow of natural disaster. Students will examine songs, paintings, and imagery to learn about the floods, pestilence, and drought that threatened the lives of southern field workers. 

Question 1) What is a delta?

Question 2) What is a flood plain?

Question 3) How do flood plains make agriculture possible?

·         Video: Bessie Smith, “Homeless Blues” (1927)

Question 4) What is the song’s subject matter?
Question 5) What are the key words, lines & arguments in the lyrics?
Question 6) Which instrument(s) do you hear?
Question 7) What mood does the music create?
Question 8) What emotions are you meant to feel while listening?

·         Video: Charley Patton, “Bo Weavil Blues” (1929)

Question 9) What is the song’s subject matter?
Question 10) What are the key words, lines & arguments in the lyrics?
Question 11) Which instrument(s) do you hear?
Question 12) What mood does the music create?
Question 13) What emotions are you meant to feel while listening?

·   Image: Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series, Panel 8 and Panel 9 

Question 14) What is the subject of the painting?
Question 15) What is the mood of the painting?
Question 16) What does the painting suggest about the conditions that helped created the Blues?

Image: Photo of destruction from the 1927 Mississippi River flood

Question 17) What is happening in the photograph?
Question 18) What connections can you find between this photograph and some of the other texts at this station?

Station 2: Hillhouse, Mississippi.
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.134613,-90.853222,13z

Even though slavery was abolished after the Civil War, African-American and white tenant farmers lived a life of grinding poverty under the rules of sharecropping. Students will examine texts to learn about this economic system.

·         Video: Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Cotton” (1959)

     Question 1) What is the song’s subject matter?

Question 2) What are the key words, lines & arguments in the lyrics? 

Question 3) Which instrument(s) do you hear?

Question 4)What mood does the music create?

Question 5) What emotions are you meant to feel while listening?

Sharecropping Source: PBS website for American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/e_sharecrop.html 

A Tough Place for Blacks

          The [Mississippi River] Delta may have been beautiful, but work there was hard. Slavery and cotton production became synonymous with the Southern economy and Mississippi. Since the Mississippi Delta was the last area of the South to be settled, after the Civil War, the state became among the most reactionary and repressive states for African Americans. Blacks lived with the daily and ever present threat and reality of violence.

Locked into Poverty

       Although blacks outnumbered whites, the sharecropping system that replaced slavery helped ensure they remained poor and virtually locked out of any opportunity for land ownership or basic human rights. The system grew from the struggle between planters and ex-slaves on how to organize production. Planters wanted gang labor, like they had used under slavery, to work the fields; freed people wanted to own and work their own land.

How Sharecropping Worked

       Under the system, the sharecropper rented a plot of land and paid for it with a percentage of the crop -- usually 30 to 50%. Sharecroppers would get tools, animals, fertilizer, seeds and food from the landlord's store and would have to pay him back at incredibly high interest rates. The landlord would determine the crop, supervise production, control the weighing and marketing of cotton, and control the recordkeeping.

Hard Work and Low Pay

       "We'd get $12 per bale and we had to pick hard in order to have money to buy food during that season," said Mississippi State Senator David Jordan, whose parents were sharecroppers. "If we had a rainy week where we couldn't pick at all, then we would have no money. We would have to go get food and substances on credit." At the end of the year, sharecroppers settled accounts by paying what they owed from any earnings made in the field. Since the plantation owners kept track of the calculations, rarely would sharecroppers see a profit. "Some came out in the hole five or six times and they never did get out of the hole," Jordan said. "So what happened, they caught the midnight train or bus and headed to Chicago and they never found 'em, 'cause that was the only way to get out of that miserable situation."

Question 6) How did the sharecropping system work?

Question 7) In what ways and to what extent did sharecropping re-create slavery for Southern African Americans?

·         Image: Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series, Panel 17

      Question 8) What is the subject of the painting?

      Question 9) What is the mood of the painting?

      Question 10) What does the painting suggest about the conditions that helped created the blues?

·         Images: Dorothea Lange, Photographs of Sharecroppers (c. 1937)

·         Cotton sharecroppers. Greene County, Georgia, 1937

      Question 11) What is happening in the photographs?

      Question 12) Specify at least four specific connections between   the photographs and the other texts at this station.

      Question 13) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

·         Poor mother and children, California, 1936

     Question 14) What is happening in the photographs?

     Question 15) Specify at least four specific connections between the photographs and the other texts at this station.

     Question 16) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

·         Sharecropper's cabin and sharecropper's wife, ten miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, 1937

     Question 17) What is happening in the photographs?

     Question 18) Specify at least four specific connections between the photographs and the other texts at this station.

     Question 19) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

     Thirteen-year old sharecropper boy near Americus, Georgia, 1937

     Question 20) What is happening in the photographs?

     Question 21) Specify at least four specific connections between the photographs and the other texts at this station.

     Question 22) What do the photos suggest about the shared experiences of African-American and white sharecroppers in the South?

      Formative Assessment:

      Writing Assignment

      How did the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life? Be sure to make specific references to the artifacts seen and heard in this lesson.

      Write a minimum of three paragraphs.