Poverty rates rising in rural towns
By Robert E. Pierre
The Washington Post
Sunday, July 18, 2004
COAHOMA, Miss. The abandoned shells of buildings along the main
drag serve as a glum backdrop for the youngsters who sit in front of them
for hours, idly chatting and staring into the occasional passing car. A
liquor store and convenience store are the only places to shop. The
little work available is seasonal or at casinos 25 miles away.
Poverty, like an annoying out-of-town cousin, has settled into this
Mississippi Delta town for an extended stay. Fifty-five percent of
households in this community of 350 take in less than $15,000 a year,
well below the federal poverty line of $18,850 for a family of four. The
last of the town's shacks, which lacked toilets and insulation, were
retired only in the past decade, after Habitat for Humanity made their
destruction a priority.
Leroy Bush has lived here all his life, picking cotton and working odd
jobs to make ends meet. He became a homeowner a decade ago in exchange
for 500 hours' worth of "sweat equity" and a promise to pay
$100 a month on an interest-free mortgage that covers the cost of the
land, insurance and materials. The labor was free.
"Everybody here is just trying to make it," said Bush, 55, who
works with his wife, Clarethea, at a nearby casino. "We do the best
we can."
The human faces of poverty for many Americans are the inner-city homeless
who sleep on grates, panhandle on corners and line up, mornings and
afternoons, at local parks for a cup of soup and a sandwich. But of the
50 counties with the highest child-poverty rates, 48 are in rural
America. Compared with urban areas, unemployment typically is higher,
education poorer and services severely limited because people are so
spread out.
A report, "Child Poverty in Rural America," prepared this year
by Loyola University of Chicago and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, found
that the gap between child poverty in rural and urban areas has widened
in recent years. One in five children in rural America lives below the
poverty line. By contrast, the child-poverty rate in metropolitan areas
is 16 percent. The rates were nearly the same a few years ago.
"In rural areas, the poverty is white, Hispanic, black and American
Indian," said Kenneth Johnson, a professor at Loyola, who
co-authored the report. "Unlike urban poverty, the rural poor are
not always right where you're going to see them."
No corner of the nation is untouched: Texas border towns, farming
communities in Montana, fishing and logging enclaves in Maine and the
mountains of Appalachia and in places such as Coahoma, in the heart
of what is known as the southern Black Belt, a crescent of counties from
Virginia to Texas in which blacks far outnumber whites.
"Rural poverty is an area that too many people don't recognize as a
problem," said Robert Forney, president and chief executive officer
of America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest hunger-relief
organization. "A lot of people believe it's got to be cheap to live
there and food has got to be more available. But cheap is relative to
income.
"The question becomes, 'How do you get help?' "
Second Harvest started putting food directly into children's hands, with
weekend "book bag" programs in which food is sent home with a
child every weekend. The Mississippi Food Network, a food bank for the
state, sends trucks out from its headquarters in Jackson, Miss., to drop
off food closer to the people who need it.
Other organizations seek both to provide for emergency food needs and to
prepare residents for a future in which they can become self-sufficient.
One of them is the Louisiana Center Against Poverty, in Lake Providence,
La., which offers self-esteem programs for children, job training for
their parents and computer-skills classes for all ages.
But new graduates face grim job prospects, said Carolyn Hunt, the
agency's executive director. Lake Providence historically is one of the
poorest places in the nation, ranked as the poorest community in the 1990
Census.
Just as in Coahoma, before machines made manual harvesting nearly extinct
in Lake Providence, there was full employment for everyone, including
small children, who often skipped school to pick cotton and vegetables.
Today, young and old line up for their share when the poverty center
opens its doors to dole out brown-paper sacks filled with potatoes,
cheese, peppers and powdered milk.
"A lot of people run out of groceries and don't have money to buy
more," said Ethel Emerson, 70. "This gives them a way to keep
going."
Back in Mississippi, Jane Boykin, president of the Jackson-based Forum on
Children and Families, lobbies on poverty and child welfare before the
state legislature. No matter how successful she is, the work never is
done. Mississippi is at or near the top in all the wrong categories:
births to single teens, low-birth-weight babies, illiteracy.
"Poverty is not just an economic indicator here," Boykin said.
"It's a part of our economy. There are a large group of people for
whom poverty provides employment" as they dole out food at shelters
and work for organizations that help the poor.
Coahoma is one of those vexing places where poverty is entrenched. In the
center of cotton country, the town lies 60 miles south of Memphis in the
flat alluvial flood plain of the Mississippi Delta. Trains filled with
cotton and passengers once made this an active trading center, but
mechanization changed things drastically by the 1940s, effectively ending
sharecropping and leaving a community bereft of jobs.
So as many Southerners had before them, Coahoma residents fled the Delta
for jobs in the North. The town continued to decline, reaching a low
point in 1977 when its school closed for good. It would be nearly another
decade before things began to look up.
"The problems are so great sometimes that you feel you're not making
a dent," said W.J. Jones, the mayor since 1982. "But I'm
optimistic. We want to improve the quality of life for those who come
after us. I know it might be some years."
