Poorest town in poorest state: segregation is gone but so are the jobs
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But there’s not a lot of money. There’s not a lot of jobs. I’ve worked in so many other [police] departments that had so much more. We don’t have a tax base. We don’t have the stores. We don’t have commercial development. We’re trying to clean up the town so hopefully people will be impressed enough to bring some jobs.
But these days Tchula is one of the small communities dotted across rural America struggling to find a way to survive. Jobs in the cotton fields – poorly paid, backbreaking work – receded with the mechanisation of plantations. There was better paid work to be had in the sawmill and sewing factory but that is gone too.
The median household income is just $12,806 a year. Nationally it was $53,915 in 2012. Unemployment is officially about 25%, but in practice only about one in four adults in Tchula has a regular job. Most employment is seasonal. More than 60% of families live below the poverty line.
Ну, и так далее. Безнадега.Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate of any state,” said Dr Ronald Myers, who established a clinic for low-income families in Tchula in 1988. “When I got here, it didn’t take a rocket genius to see the reason the healthcare was so bad, that the infant mortality rate was so high. There were mothers who were eight months pregnant before they saw a doctor, if they saw a doctor at all. That’s a product for infant mortality disaster.“There was a total insensitivity to the poor. The first 20 women I saw in Tchula had never had a breast examination. Six of them had lumps and two of them were cancerous.