Education segregation in the Mississippi Delta
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Mississippi Delta region has had the most segregated schools—and for the longest time—of any part of the United States. As recently as the 2016–2017 school year, East Side High School in Cleveland, Mississippi, was practically all black: 359 of 360 students were African-American.
Background
The Delta region of Mississippi is nineteen counties in the northwest of the state, bounded on the west by the Mississippi River and the south by the Yazoo River. It is a poor region of the country's poorest state. In the center is Sunflower County, which serves as an example for the region. It is consistently 72% Black or African-American at every census. In 1960, the average income of African Americans in Sunflower County was lower than the federal poverty line. Farm mechanization in the first half of the twentieth century, among other things, had made employment prospects bad in the region. As a result, from 1940 to 1970, there was net outward migration to northern and western inner cities and suburbs and from 1970 to present, urban centers in the South outside of Mississippi. The population has been decreasing since 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Education segregation in the Mississippi Delta” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.