Small Southern Towns Ravaged by Storms — and Poverty

This weekend, major media has been covering the recent tornado destruction in fifteen central Mississippi counties, which killed at least ten people, including several children. Having grown up in Midwestern tornado country, I can attest to how truly frightening the freakish storms can be, and my heart sank when I read and heard about people hiding out in their cupboards or walk-in freezers to survive the nearly mile-wide storm. What the mainstream news reports largely ignore is the already impoverished state of the area and how this will impact people already living without many resources.

It reminded me of a story I recently read over at the Equal Voice newspaper about a small Mississippi town a little over an hour's drive from Yazoo City and the surrounding tornado-affected areas. The feature is about a young man named Quincy Mackin from Hollandale, where the median per capita income is under $10,000 a year. Mackin's story is one of hope — or at least, a positive outcome from a devastating journey. Mackin had long ago passed every test required for his high school diploma except one. At 21, he was still struggling to master his English 2 test, which was filled with content related to sentence structure and parts of speech — something he'd never learned in elementary school.

Mackin's story may seem extreme, but the Equal Voice story focuses on the difficulties of escaping the poverty of the Delta region. In Hollandale alone, two of its three schools have been rated "failing" by the Department of Education. Mackin attended two of the fifty lowest performing schools in the state for elementary and middle school, putting him at a significant disadvantage from the start. In the article, a regional Teach for America director is interviewed and speaks about the inherited legacy of the predominantly black area — a separate but very unequal educational system.

In the New York Times story, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency compared some of the damage to the post-Hurricane Katrina landscape, with whole sections of town completely bulldozed by the storm. I say that this area already has enough trouble. Let's put pressure on the state and national governments to make sure the recovery efforts and emergency funds are handed better than they were after Katrina so that people like Quincy Mackin, already struggling against poverty and educational disparities, have more than a fighting chance.

Photo Credit: laffy4k