Tony Dunbar

“The Train Doesn’t Run There Anymore”

 

…On his way to shoot bear at Onward, Teddy Roosevelt had the train stop at Mound Bayou so that he could greet the people of the Delta’s unique all-black town. He had his picture taken shaking hands with blacks, and in doing so confirmed all white Mississippi­ans’ suspicions about Republicans.

Mound Bayou is a part of the Mississippi heritage that has not disappeared, but that has certainly suffered from neglect. Situated a few miles north of Cleveland, it has its origins in Brierfield and Hurricane, the plantations of the Jefferson Davis family at Davis Bend, south of Vicksburg. Jefferson’s older brother, Joseph, a Nat­chez lawyer and soldier, had been taken with the idea of “harmoni­ous cooperation” for profit espoused by Robert Owens. Joseph was one of only a handful of people in Mississippi before the Civil War who owned more than three hundred slaves, and the only one of them who provided incentives for production and “courts of justice” which heard each slave’s case before an overseer could administer punishment.

The star of Davis’s “slave-utopia” was Benjamin Thornton Mont­gomery, a slave who ran the commissary and ultimately became the buying and selling agent for all of the plantation crops. Montgomery was permitted to retain a share of his profits, and with them, he paid Davis the value of his wife’s services, so that she could stay home and raise Montgomery’s five children. During the Civil War the Davises abandoned their plantations when Admiral Porter’s gunboats came up the river. General Grant made Davis Bend a sanctuary for “con­trabands,” slaves who trailed the Union army for freedom, and had the land divided among teams of blacks to farm. In 1865 nearly 2,000 blacks, divided into ten-person companies, farmed nearly 5,000 acres, and they showed a profit. In the following year, however, the original landowners regained their title and the great experiment ended. Partly to avoid claims for reparations, Joseph Davis sold his plantation to Montgomery. Unfortunately for the buyer, the Missis­sippi River changed course the next year and greatly reduced river access to, and the local importance of, the Davis Bend plantations. Montgomery, nevertheless, moved his twenty-seven-person house­hold into Jefferson Davis’s Brierfield “mansion,” on whose grounds his daughter Virginia developed extensive flower gardens. Without a doubt Benjamin Montgomery was the foremost black businessman of slave and Reconstruction times.

Jeff Davis, never satisfied with his older brother’s sale of Brierfield and Hurricane, sued, and in 1881 the Mississippi Supreme Court rec­ognized him and the other heirs of Joseph Davis as owners of Davis Bend. Ben Montgomery died before the ruling. His son, Isaiah, opened a little store in Vicksburg. In 1887, the Louisville, New Orleans, and Texas Railroad, building a roadbed through the Delta, offered cheap land to settlers along its right-of-way. Isaiah and his cousin Ben Green sold all of their possessions and with the proceeds bought 840 acres of railroad land in Bolivar County near an Indian mound and called it Mound Bayou. They recruited a small band, primarily for­mer Davis slaves, to settle there, to multiply, and to buy more land.

Much of their success was due to the high regard the white com­munity had for Isaiah Montgomery. He was the only black delegate to the 1890 constitutional convention, where he rose to speak in favor of black disenfranchisement as a means to racial peace.

By 1907, 800 families possessed close to 30,000 acres and had cleared about 6,000 of them from the wild. They organized a bank, a town-meeting form of government based on the Davis Bend experi­ment, and a committee to rid the community of any “loose family relationships.” Isaiah was a friend of Booker T. Washington, and with his help and that of Sears, Roebuck president Julius Rosen­wald, the townsfolk organized a cottonseed-oil mill and a farmers’ cooperative. White visitors who passed through were accommodated at the twenty-one-room Montgomery home. It was the collapse of cotton prices after World War I that killed the town, or at least its usefulness as a model for black economic development. The bank, the mill, and the cooperative all failed, and the townspeople yielded to the greater culture and went off to sharecrop.

The town produced early civil rights leadership, like Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard, who opened the first meeting of the Mis­sissippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership in 1952 and led resist­ance to Governor Hugh White’s bid for black support of “separate but equal” schools in 1954. Isaiah’s daughter Mary Booze was a Republican national committeewoman from 1924 to 1948. During the movement of the 1960s, Mound Bayou was a haven and meeting place for civil rights workers, white and black.

The town was noted in the 1960s as the home of two black-owned hospitals. Both were created by black fraternal associations, the Knights of Tabor and the International Order of Friendship, and they were financed with the nickels and dimes of sharecroppers. They were basically the only medical facilities for blacks between Jackson and Memphis. In 1967 Tufts University opened a health clinic in Mound Bayou; the sprinkling of whites among its profes­sional staff lived in the town for safety and became its first white residents. It spawned another short-lived cooperative farming experiment, which distributed the bounty of its harvest to the poor and shipped a line of “soul food” north for profit.

The black fraternal hospitals closed in the 1980s after the more modern medical facilities in nearby Cleveland desegregated, but the Tufts project, now the federally funded Delta Health Center, has survived. Its director is L. C. Dorsey, a diminutive fifty-year-old so­cial worker whose soft eyes and constant good humor conceal an energetic and combative spirit. She is one of those who have “come home” to the Delta and stayed. She was born to sharecropping par­ents near Shelby and picked cotton herself until the last of her six children was born. Then the civil rights movement touched her, and by 1968 she was director of the 400-acre cooperative farm in Mound Bayou. In 1971 she took a chance and left Mississippi to pursue a social-work degree at the State University of New York, though she had only a GED and no college degree. She fought against the death penalty in Mississippi, and then earned her master’s and a doctorate at Howard before joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi in its Rural Health Research program.

In 1988 she returned to the Delta to run the health clinic and says, “I love being back.” True, there are things she misses in her little town, like a daily newspaper, a restaurant, and a place where adults can go for drinks and conversation, but there are compensa­tions, like neighbors who check on you when the porch light is lit and stop in when you are sick, a “caring, sharing thing,” she calls it. Plus the challenge of grabbing federal dollars that are increas­ingly scarce and delivering quality health care in one of America’s poorest counties. "I was so bored in academia,” she says, “that I was thinking about joining the Peace Corps. The faculty thought I had a character defect because I wanted to be in service to people. Now, every day, I see things I want to accomplish.”

Her first year on the job, the clinic sponsored a back-to-school party for the town’s teenagers around the theme of “Say No to Pregnancy,” and Dr. Dorsey says, “We would like to see our program expanded into Sunflower County. And I would like to get the Missis­sippi Symphony to come and do a performance for the town and staff.” And the ideas keep coming.

The town could use more with energy like hers. While there are several new public buildings in Mound Bayou today, vestiges of the federal gravy train during the War on Poverty, the town suffers from much the same miasma that affects most little towns in the Delta. It is clean, but storefronts are boarded up and the most notable activity is around the beer store and the video rental outlet. The Montgomery house still stands, and the gardens are tended, but a few of the window panes have been knocked out. Though it has more than the average number of black landowners and professionals, Mound Bayou is basically poor, and if its experience stands for any­thing, it is that it is difficult in America, and especially difficult for blacks in a segregated society, to create a successful enterprise zone without drawing upon resources from beyond the zone’s boundaries. Mound Bayou’s future success, like that of most Delta towns, will depend on its ability to attract outside investment. It may have a special advantage in that its citizens can boast a long history of resourcefulness and self-reliance. Some of that may play a part in the surprising fact that Mound Bayou eleventh-graders did much better than the state average, and vastly better than the state aver­age for black children, in Mississippi’s 1987 functional literacy exam. Because the people of Mound Bayou own much of the sur­rounding land, they are in a better position than most Delta blacks to reap the benefits of any development the town may enjoy. The sign as you leave town reads, “Remember the Past as We Venture into the Future,” courtesy of the Mound Bayou Business League, and if the town can continue to persuade its brightest and best émigrés to come back home, it may indeed have a future.