nature & planetanalysisLibrary of Congress: Worlds Revealed
The Unique Geography and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta is not the triangular river delta near New Orleans at the Gulf of Mexico. It is an alluvial plain in northwestern Mississippi, lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, built from silt the rivers deposited over time. Its rich soil made it a centre of cotton and tobacco plantations, which relied on enslaved labour and later sharecroppers. From that rural world came Delta blues, performed in juke joints by musicians such as Robert Johnson and Charley Patton. The region was also a centre of the civil rights movement, including Freedom Summer in 1964.
Rivers slow down when they reach flat land and drop the silt they carry, building up fertile alluvial soil in a floodplain. Over thousands of years repeated floods spread this sediment across the region, which is why the land was so productive for crops.
The name reflects an older idea of what a delta is, which shows how place names can outlast the science behind them. The region helped produce a major American music form and was central to the struggle for voting rights.
background
The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" ("Southern" in the sense of "characteristic of its region, the American South") because of its racial, cultural, and economic history.
The Delta is 200 miles (320 km) long and 87 miles (140 km) across at its widest point, encompassing about 4.4 million acres (6,875 sq mi; 17,806 km2) of alluvial floodplain. Originally covered in hardwood forest across the bottomlands, it was developed as one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the nation before the American Civil War (1861–1865). The region attracted many speculators who developed land along the riverfronts for cotton plantations; they became wealthy planters dependent on the labor of people they enslaved, who composed the vast majority of the population in these counties well before the Civil War, often twice the number of whites.
From Wikipedia: Mississippi Delta (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗ · text CC BY-SA 4.0
.jpg){kind=spacer}
Illustrative photo · Brandonrush, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
.jpg)
.jpg)
