Washington _____ reporter Chico Harlan pondered whether Tunica County completely squandered its day in the sun when casinos boomed for nearly twenty years in that area in a story published in today's edition. His thesis is Tunica wasted a golden opportunity to lift itself out of poverty after Sixty Minutes showed Tunica to be one of the poorest areas in America in a 1985 story. Mr. Harlan reports:
For two decades, ever since her county of plantations and shotgun shacks had struck it rich, she’d been awaiting the prosperity. Great jobs for all, she’d imagined. Improved living standards. Perhaps no place in America’s Deep South had ever received a better chance to create new economic opportunities for its people. Starting in the early 1990s, Tunica had become a neon-lit casino destination. The county had since raked in $759 million, a fortune for a county with 10,000 people.
But as she worried about her house, Engle-Harris — like many in Tunica — was beginning to sense that the greatest windfall in the history of the rural South had failed to lift up a community where many African Americans still lived in crumbling shacklike homes.
Despite all the casino money, a county that ranked in the 1980s among the nation’s poorest today had one of Mississippi’s highest unemployment rates. A county lashed 30 years ago in a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment for its “apartheid” schools still had a mostly white private academy and a public school system that was 97 percent black and was given a “D” grade by the state. A county that the Rev. Jesse Jackson once described as “America’s Ethiopia” had changed little in its poorest neighborhoods, even as riverfront casinos and other lavish development had sprouted up along the farmland hugging the Mississippi River.
Tunica’s strike-it-rich narrative is a rarity in the Deep South. But the disappointing way it played out shows how fundamental — and possibly intractable — the problems are in an area that lags behind the rest of the country as the poorest region with the least economic opportunity. A major research study last year on upward mobility, measuring a poor child’s chances of climbing the economic ladder, found that Tunica had less opportunity than all but six other counties in the United States — scattered across Alaska, South Dakota and Virginia....
What went wrong in Tunica is a matter of perspective. For many African Americans — and the county’s current officials — it was a story of a largely white political leadership that did not grasp the depths of poverty facing many black residents and did not choose to use the casino revenues that flowed into the county in an equitable way. So instead of funding skills training and providing programs for the vulnerable, they poured money into a riverfront wedding hall, an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool and a golf course designed by a former PGA Tour pro — all while implementing a massive tax cut that primarily benefited the wealthy.
“It is a success story for those in the right social circle,” said Engle-Harris, who is black, echoing the perspectives of many African Americans interviewed here.
To the political leadership that developed the casino plans and spent that money, however, the story is one of good intentions gone awry, an attempt to boost an industry that could potentially create jobs in a corner of the country that never had much of an economy or hope for the future.
Whatever the intentions, the results have left Tunica, and more specifically some of its residents, in an economically dangerous place. Rest of the article.
One problem with the story. The reporter obtains hardly any quotes from anyone who was in power at during most of this time. There is one short quote from the county administrators but no discussions with supervisors or business leaders. The story fails in that regard. The reporter spends more space on quoting so-called "poverty experts" than he does anyone from the community or business sector who led Tunica County before the current crop of leaders.
17 comments:
Yes. The white people failed them by spending more $ per student than in any other area of the state - only to have the school taken-over by the state.
This tells me that increased funding for education makes very little difference if it's not spent in the classroom. If most of the increased education money in Tunica was spent on administration, giving jobs to someone's brother or uncle or cousin, It is no surprise that the increased funding didn't help. This is a cautionary tale for everyone who thinks that spending more money on education is going to get anything done. If more money is spent on education, there needs to be a way to prevent it from being spent on more administration.
2:19 How does your statement (untrue, BTW) pertain to the WaPo article? As anyone who's visited Tunica can attest, very little of that casino money was spent on the school system.
The workforce consists of people who don't know the difference between toast and bacon. I kid you not. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/01/monte-carlo-mississippi/306245/
From the article:
"This is a different world," Dorothy Rhea, a waitress at one of the casinos, says, describing the sensation of coming to Tunica from Memphis. To explain what she means, she tells a story of working with a new waitress, a young black woman from Tunica. "She's holding out a plate of bacon," Rhea says of the other woman, "and she keeps asking me, 'Is this toast? I need toast. Is this toast?'" The woman was not being sarcastic, Rhea explains. "She really didn't know what toast was."
"all while implementing a massive tax cut that primarily benefited the wealthy."
I am so sick of this bullshit. Poor people don't pay income taxes (hell, they get money back that they never paid in because of the EITC) so the only people who can get their taxes lowered are those who pay taxes. Everyone who works, gets paid, and pays taxes is therefore considered "the wealthy" by the poverty pimps.
Typical Yankee thinking he is smarter than anyone in Mississippi. I would love to see him try to educate the students of Tunica.
4:57,
Are you serious???
If the paving, maybe done with CDBG money, changed the drainage pattern to run up under the houses, there should be some recourse.
Tunica officials did not plan the casinos. All of the casinos were planned and designed in Nevada, to my knowledge.
The first critical need was for housing for casino employees and someone built some apartments. Are they all occupied? The roads constructed were extensive. Wonder what has happened to the empty hotels. Could they be converted to housing for the poorer communities?
I know the problems in the Mississippi Delta are huge and change has not been a hallmark of the last 50+ years. Money has not changed much nor has changing from white to black leadership. The upkeep on the courthouses has been terrible and I don't even know about the school building.
Do Tunica's youth have to pay to go swimming in this indoor facility? What is the wedding center being used for? How many wedding per year? And at what cost. The reporter needs to revisit this story and complete it, I believe.
@ 4:57, are you serious? They spent money on buildings and computers way before all of the other schools in the state did. Access to resources has not been the problem in Tunica. The last number that I saw had them in the Top 10 in the state in per student spending - along the lines of $12,000.
The problem, as the PTA president said in the interviews that I heard, is the lack of parental involvment.
"skills training". This term cracks me up. Show me where free "skills training" has ever brought anyone up from poverty. It hasn't.
The problem is that you can't FORCE people to become independent, educated, or goal oriented. Either they want a better life (and will do anything to achieve it) of they won't. Giving away "skills training" does nothing. Just live giving away free baby sitting, errrrrr, Head Start, does nothing to improve any kids chance in life.
Want free skills training? Join the military. Maybe you will pick up some disipline and money for college too...
"Typical Yankee thinking he is smarter than anyone in Mississippi."
Odds are, he is.
Are you aware of what test scores are in every other state? That Mississippi has the lowest score of all 50 states to qualify for a National Merit Scholarship Finalist status? I cold go on and on but I think big numbers would make your head hurt.
Hey 7:01..things have changed in the Delta. Bennie Thompson went from a flat broke local politician to a millionaire. Now that's change you can take to the bank!!!
It wasn't too long ago I read an article about how the casinos could use the locals because their math skills were so poor. Thanks Mississippi. At least your flag won't be racist this time next year if the coaches get their way.
This paragraph tells it all: Hundreds of years of segregation are now creating a “very hard-to-break pattern of human behavior and economic relations,” said Robert C. Lieberman, the provost at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and an authority on race in America.
I was a restaurant consultant for several Tunica casino properties and can vouch for 5:02's story about the toast. Management struggled with getting cooks to follow recipes (they couldn't read) and waitstaff didn't understand the basics of service. One reason was they had no experiences they could relate. It was like describing an elephant to a blind man. One server in a steak house didn't understand rare, medium rare, medium, etc. So he just ordered everything medium regardless of what the customer asked. We held a meeting and asked what was the best restaurant each had visited. McDonald's and burger joints and neighborhood juke joints comprised the majority of answers. They also didn't understand they had to show up for work every day they were scheduled and be on time and clean and neat. Handwashing? Not a skill they had learned. And many had a thing about "serving" because they considered it demeaning. Taking orders from guests was viewed as taking orders from the plantation boss. Reread Provost Lieberman's comment above.
Well, $12000 per student might have worked if it actually was spent on helping each student and hiring more teachers.
With 10000 people it probably would have improved their lives more just to divide up the money equally.
And, if some of you actually believe that white politicians aren't as wasteful of our tax dollars as black politicians and aren't using our tax dollars to line their own pockets and that of their friends, you are hopelessly naïve. It's a matter of whose friends get the money.
It's hardly been just black politicians in this state who have gone into office as poor boys and come out of office rich!
Y'all need to actually follow the money. And, it's not just our tax money you need to follow. Look at how you elected official lives. Look at the value of his home(s) and compare it to money earned and ask yourselves if it " adds up". It's not just salary either, it's the " freebies".
But, as long as we are math challenged, they can keep not just picking our pocket but actually passing laws and regulations that make it legal to steal! Or didn't you get the memo that our Congress can still indulge in insider trading by just telling their wives and children and other family members how to invest.
I was struck by the article as well. One thing it noted was the property tax decrease in the midst of the Casino Boom. It noted that out of 10,000 residents in Tunica, there were 3200 property owners. Of those 3200, 100 of the largest owners collected 76% of the property tax reduction benefit. The problem is that when the property taxes went down, the casino money didn't make up for the deficit enough to create and maintain social services needed to actually invest in the poor people of Tunica to help create more social mobility. In order for a community to truly benefit from a property tax decrease, more people need to be paying the property taxes. What probably was a better route to go was to delay a property tax decrease until you have a better representation of the community paying the taxes, that way more of the people would benefit from the decrease.
Aside from the obvious cultural and social divides that came with placing Vegas Style casinos in the poorest county in the country, the political leadership did not grasp the vast challenges of inequality that Tunica presented. One must understand how a community with so much fertile farmland become as segregated as South Africa in the 1980's. The thinking that drove that social arrangement still predominated when the casinos came. To put property tax cuts up as one of the first things that was done reflects the political leadership that was either the actual landed elites or backed by them (which is the case throughout the history and geography of the Mississippi Delta). That thinking has to be broken if there is any hope of helping the people in these communities thrive.
The schooling challenges remain because the schools are still segregated. In community of 10,000, a private academy represents segregation in schooling, which helps bring about what we see in Tunica. The people who have the social capital (knowledge, networks, experience) to actually turn things around educationally in the county have no(perceived) vested interest in doing so (their "interests" don't attend the public schools there). Change in that arena is a steep uphill battle.
Tunica is a microcosm of the challenges of social and political progress in Mississippi as a whole. Politics and politicians that win out locally do not understand/care/ know how to address intractable poverty in many communities. So long as poor people are seen as culturally and morally challenged by those in power, the proper investments and policies will never be enacted. And we will continue to have this conversation for the foreseeable future.
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