
          Journey of Change.
          Reviewed by Poinsett, AlexAlex Poinsett
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 14-15
          
          Delta Time: A Journey Through
Mississippi, by Tony Dunbar. (New York: Pantheon Books,
1990. 245 pages.).
          An elderly Mississippi Delta plantation owner is found hanging in
his bedroom. Had he committed suicide or had he been murdered? The
dead man's grandson is certain a murderer hides among his black
sharecroppers. Unable to find him, he arbitrarily picks a family of
three and ties them to stakes. Then, while he and other white men
force the remaining blacks on his plantation to watch, he burns the
helpless family alive.
          That tragedy occurred more than 50 years ago. By 1968, when author
Tony Dunbar secretly interviewed black tenant farmers and
sharecroppers, Mississippi Delta blacks were no longer burned at
stakes. Instead, they were only beaten with ax handles and clubs,
teargassed, shotgunned, and blasted with dynamite. Or they were
anchored in rivers and planted in shallow graves, often for trying to
exercise their civil rights.
          Prudently, Dunbar, at that time a 19-year-old Atlantan, hid during
the day and ventured forth only at night to avoid reprisals from irate
plantation owners. His first book, Our Land Too, related the troubled
lives of Delta tenant farmers. His newest book chronicles the author's
findings 20 years later, as he with keen-eyed sensitivity retraces his
earlier journey--less wary, less concerned about harm coming to
himself or his interviewees. For Dunbar found that the Delta had
changed markedly during the past two decades.
          Racial atrocities no longer scar its collective
consciousness. Catfish has replaced cotton as the region's major cash

crop. Black voters, once brutally suppressed, have elected more black
candidates in Mississippi than in any other state be cause of the 1965
Voting Rights Act and federal lawsuits outlawing racial
gerrymandering. The University of Mississippi, once a battleground for
violent segregationist resistance to black student enrollment, now
presents Distinguished Black Mississippian Awards.
          In 1988, the honorees were the Delta's Robert Clark, the state's
first black state legislator of modern times; the Most Reverend Joseph
Howze of Mobile, the first black bishop to head a Catholic diocese in
the United States; the Delta's country music great Charlie Pride; and
state Attorney General Robert Gibbs.
          A posthumous award went to Fannie Lou Hamer, the former Delta
sharecropper and gallant freedom fighter who once had lamented that
she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired."
          Far from suggesting that the Mississippi Delta is now a racial
Utopia, Dunbar notes that poverty still abounds. Farm economics has
shifted blacks from the plantations to low-paying jobs at fast food
franchises or onto public welfare. Massive health problems plague the
Delta's 60percent-black residents. The public schools are almost
totally black because white students still flock to private
segregation academies.
          Black elected officials have taken over many town halls and school
systems, but have little to govern in the Delta's dying small
towns. While the 122-memberstate legislature includes 20 blacks, they
are less than half the representatives that would be proportionate to
the state's 35 percent black population.
          In 1987, Gov. Ray Mabus, a political moderate, was supported by 90
percent of black voters, Dunbar reports. The governor promptly
disappointed them by backing a white Tupelo woman, Billie Thompson, to
replace Ed Cole, the black chairman of the state Democratic Party. In
spite of Mabus, Cole was elected by a Party vote of 56 to 41.
          The governor thinks the civil rights struggle is essentially won,
Dunbar writes angrily, and that the way is now cleared to address
"real problems." However, if such thinking is the best that
Mississippi has to offer, then it--like the rest of America--has yet
to trod a long journey before finally reconciling its races and
achieving what Dun bar aptly calls "the final armistice of the Civil
War"-- 125 years after the last shots were fired.
          
            Alex Poinsett, widely published free-lance writer, with
long acquaintance of Mississippi, is a Contributing Editor of
Ebony Magazine.
          
        