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The question for Lake Providence is how much $100 million in tax breaks, job-training subsidies and other federal grants could change the desperate life of its people. The complex economic and social factors that have sunk the town in misery have been in place since the days of slavery. After the Civil War, freed slaves stayed on as sharecroppers and independent farmers, but after World War II the widespread use of farm machinery destroyed thousands of agricultural jobs. At the same time, plantation owners resisted industrial development that could have brought new jobs and higher wages.
As a result, East Carroll Parish lost nearly half its population after 1940, shrinking from more than 19,000 to 9,800 and depriving Lake Providence of potential black leaders -- people like William Jefferson, who left to become a Harvard Law School graduate and a Congressman from New Orleans, and Charles Jones, who is now a member of the state senate.
Meanwhile, the absence of jobs and talent has only served to reinforce the age-old Southern pattern of white authority and black subservience. "We've still got a lot of people working in white folks' kitchens or driving tractors," says Mayor Brown. "They're afraid to speak up for themselves because they're afraid of losing their jobs. They still have to say, 'Yassir, whatever you say.' "
Though black voters outnumber whites 2 to 1 and constitute majorities in most local government districts as the result of a long-running voting-rights case, their political power is limited. They control the poorly funded town government, but whites outnumber them 6 to 3 on the parish Police Jury (comparable to a county board of supervisors), which controls the bulk of local government spending. Blacks have not capitalized on their political opportunities, says the Rev. C.H. Murray, a Baptist minister, because "there's still a lot of slave mentality here, people thinking they should wait on the Lord to solve our problems." According to local leaders, easily intimidated black voters sometimes sell their votes.
; Many whites believe their hold on power is the bulwark that keeps Lake Providence from descending into barbarity. "We don't have any colored leadership," says Captan Jack Wyly, a lawyer and prominent power broker who says he understands the blacks because long ago his ancestors owned theirs. "When I came home from the Army in 1945, 20% to 25% of our land was owned by blacks. But the welfare system has just undermined the incentive to work. When Daddy died, they'd sell their property, buy a Buick and go out West to Las Vegas or somewhere. They lost their work ethic; they lost their discipline with all this gimme stuff. Who would have thought that Negro girls would get pregnant to get on food stamps? Now they do it all the time." Wyly's biggest fear is that whites will be infected by what he considers black amorality. "Goddam, if we have two races exploding, that's the end of America!"