From The Atlantic:

How White Flight Ravaged the Mississippi Delta

For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.

Alan Huffman

JANUARY 6, 2015

… The situation is impossible to ignore: Among the key towns of the civil-rights era, those with the largest black majorities are frequently in the most economic trouble.