Avoid Greenville at all costs (Indianola, Leland: section 8, violent crime, landlord)

[CC-2224]

Originally Posted by Delmarhi

As a life-long resident of this place, I can inform you to never to come here. As you can read above this, the schools are an absolute and total joke. The racism people are telling you about againt the whites is absolutely true. The mayor, that some are defending, is a joke. They have record taxe and fees here and zero as far as infrastructure. They would rather talk about opening a swimming pool than building a road. At the beginning of her administration all the whites in public offices began to be pushed out. We all remember the tv event between her and the ex-fire chief. Every high priced housing is up for sale as all the white citizens run to the county to live in moble homes to escape. I've met managers from the former factory Textron and they couldn't even get there wives to go out shopping by themselves. My parents, who also live here, have been robbed for the last three Christmas, the last one we actually had video tape of the people along with multiple witnes that identified them and still have yet to get these people arrested. Sad part is, they are my parents' neighbors and contine to live there to this day.

You hit the nail on the head with this post. I've lived here all of my life and i've seen the decline of this city. I was once part of the group that used to drive "the strip" from sonic to the levee and hang out at pasquale's, but now it is no longer safe to drive anywhere north of the greenville mall. The mayor seems to have decided that living in greenville is beneath her and now has an appartment in jackson since her house was forclosed on (she stays in greenville a few days per week). She has fired any non "democrat" in any position of authority, and her only concern is what she can do to further her own political career or what will get her on the front page of a newspaper or magazine. Hopefully she will not be elected to the Governers office and her career will end when this term is up. The crime rate in this city is unbelievable. When you get out of your car, lock the drivers door even if you just are walking around to get something out of your trunk, the "democrats" will rob you blind just that fast. Maybe if the police department was more concerned with investigating crimes instead of writing tickets (they have been told to write as many as possible because of finacial problems due to the poor city management), the crime rate would be less of a problem. Don't get me wrong, there are a FEW good and decent police officers, unfortunatly they are few and far between and are doing their jobs with their hands tied behind their backs and blindfolded. This city is on a downward slope and i have a real fear that in a few years will end up being another Mound Bayou.

[RCM032505]

Well said cc

[slowlane]

Originally Posted by Choctaw 59

Have you ever wondered what's in the city water?I know its brown and soft but why does it taste so bad?I wonder if there is a lot of cancer because of that water in Greenville along with the almighty bug trucks that spray us during the Summer.What do you think?

I've never been to MS. But there was a front page story in the Washington D.C. Post newspaper, a year or more ago, about the brown water in (I think it was) Greenville. As I recall, Barack Obama visited there while campaigning, and the residents and local officials were hoping he would take on their cause and get funding to clean their water, as it was spooking visitors and discouraging industry from locating there. A local hotel was trying to assure guests that the brown color is due to (as I recall?) tannic acid in tree roots, and harmless.

[melncrg]

Oh my goodness....I don't even know if this is still an active site, but GOLLY! More than 19,000 folks have read the awful things you've had to say about my town! I've lived here for 52 years, have never been robbed, have never been assaulted, have only good things to report about life in general. To the folks who see the worst: do you look for opportunities to be proactive in the community? Do you walk through the WalMart and judge? Or do you make eye contact and receive a smile in return? (I do.)

I'm flabbergasted that folks will put so much energy into destroying a community when they could be doing so much to improve it.

[GrandviewGloria]

Originally Posted by slowlane

I've never been to MS. But there was a front page story in the Washington D.C. Post newspaper, a year or more ago, about the brown water in (I think it was) Greenville. As I recall, Barack Obama visited there while campaigning, and the residents and local officials were hoping he would take on their cause and get funding to clean their water, as it was spooking visitors and discouraging industry from locating there. A local hotel was trying to assure guests that the brown color is due to (as I recall?) tannic acid in tree roots, and harmless.

Believe it or not, Greenville's water was once considered to be among the best in THE NATION. That was back in the early Seventies. A Delta aristocrat who'd relocated to Madison, showed me an old copy of TOWN & COUNTRY...and there it was, on a rather short list, along with places like Greenwich Connecticut and Santa Barbara. She showed me another T&C, with an article on Greenville and its A-List. That was an exclusive magazine, back then, and they only did write-ups on really posh places. Greenville's elite were considered equals by 'Best Society' everywhere. It was in the top tier of American communities.

But demographics are destiny: and with a little help from JFK and that perverted exhibitionist 'Lyndon', and their 'Great Society', the power balance shifted, the problem demographic reached Critical Mass, and the city that once was home to more published authors per-capita than Paris.... well... it changed.

I had my first glimpse of Greenville when I was nine or ten. I rode over with my employers to pick up their new Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado Biarritz (that, alone, was enough to give me goosebumps...), and oh, my goodness! Those straight, flat boulevards, with tall trees arching over them! The tall, elegant houses...one after another...

Most towns in Mississippi are laid-out on old Cow trails/Indian trails/Pig trails. They're all tangled-up and higgledy-piggledy, and reflect, pretty well, the Third-World status of the state, and the foggy, substandard thinking of its inhabitants. But Greenville was part of mainstream AMERICA: not Mississippi. Greenville was gridded...orthogonal...rational...cultivated...eng ineered: American.

For somebody like me, accustomed to riding the crooked, narrow, back roads of the hills, counting money for an elderly bootlegger, entering into that well-planned city (the residential blocks had alleys in the middle, nicer than the main street of our little hamlet...my employer showed me the sunken trash cans, and let me get out of his giant black Fleetwood Brougham, and flip the lid of one up by its foot-pedal....WOW!) ...entering that world was like going into another spatial dimension. The tall clipped hedges, the sedate houses.... I dreamed for decades of owning one of those houses, someday. I have its photo somewhere. I've since learned that it was built in the Twenties, and is a replica of an Eighteenth-Century townhouse in Connecticut.

But life seldom takes us where our dreams go. I'm doomed to live in asymmetrical 'ramblers'. We built a 'Creole Compound' in Madison, and now are feeling like overexposed Goldfish in a 'Modernist Masterpiece', out here on the Pacific Rim. I long for that rational, whitewashed brick Federal townhouse in Greenville. But it will never happen. I've heard about Greenville City Council meetings. I've heard about the tragicomedic robbery of The Book Inn (the classiest place I'd ever been in, back in the early-Eighties, when I discovered it...first time I'd ever heard Chamber Music...)...the trail of robber's blood into the Councilwoman's home... There's no way I'll buy a house in a town where the 'authorities' are hostile and corrupt.

But back to the water: A smaller Delta town went under before Greenville did. Nice place, straight out of Summer & Smoke...until the changeover to 'minority' rule. Within a couple of years, raw sewage had somehow gotten into the water supply. A broker in high-dollar capital goods....my mentor in things they don't teach in MBA programs...one of many Gay men who've helped me along the way...was from that town. He told me about the sale, by cousins, of the old family mansion on the main street. Members of the newly-ascendant demographic bought it, and first cut down every living thing in the yard: beautiful hundred-year-old Magnolias, Camellias, Holly trees. That done, they proceeded to butcher a hog. There were several downstairs porches, but they chose to butcher the hog on the front porch...right there on the nicest street in town. That, to me, symbolizes the fate and future of Delta towns.

[mississippimagnolia]

Oh for heaven's sake! There are a ton of things wrong with Greenville....poverty, horrible horrible horrible public schools, rampant public corruption, out of control crime, segregation like I've never seen anywhere, completely worthless health care...I could go on and on and on.

But the water is fine! Yes, it's brown. It's brown because of the cypress trees. Would you rather them bleach it? Honestly?

We spent a year in Greenville. I met some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life. And we loved our church. With all the other problems in Greenville, brown water should be the least of people's concerns.

[id6126]

Grumpybug789 and sashaBlue you are so right. But grumpybu789 and sashaBlue the demised of greenville ms. is because of all discrmination(white on white black on black and black on white). It a downward spiral and it did not not start yesterday it did not start 5 years ago. It starts from the top; city council, school boards, neighborhoods, family etc.. It going to take everyone effort to dig Greenville out of the hole it is in. Compromises and harsh decisons must be made. But understand the kids are the key. I pray that one day they will understand.

[SacalaitWhisperer]

The Greatest Flood in History
In the winter of 1926-27 the rains were so heavy that on the tributaries of the Mississippi the water had overflowed the banks, causing floods to the west in Oklahoma and Kansas, to the east in Illinois and Kentucky. On Good Friday, April 15, 1927, the Memphis Commercial Appeal warned: "The roaring Mississippi River, bank and levee full from St. Louis to New Orleans, is believed to be on its mightiest rampage...All along the Mississippi considerable fear is felt over the prospects for the greatest flood in history."

That Good Friday morning, the rains came, setting all-time records for their breadth and intensity. They came down over several hundred thousand square miles, covering much or all of the states of Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. In New Orleans in 18 hours there were 15 inches of rain—the greatest ever known there. The river swelled so high and flowed so fast that in Berry's woods, for the residents along the river, " It was like facing an angry, dark ocean."
One man recalled, decades later, "I saw a whole tree just disappear, sucked under by the current, then saw it shoot up, it must have been a hundred yards [downstream]. Looked like a missile fired by a submarine."

In the spring of 1927, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assured the public that the levees would hold. The Corps had built them, after all. But as had been the case at the mouth of the river, the Corps overestimated its own prowress and underestimated the power of the river. The Corps built the levee system to confine the river. They represented man's power over nature. If necessary, it was thought, the flow would be reduced with outlets that would divert part of the river into the biggest outlet of all, the Atchafalaya River, into the Gulf, or at Bonnet Carre, just above New Orleans, into Lake Pontchartrain and then to the Gulf. Neither levees or outlets would work, according to James Buchanan Eads, the man who built the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi, at St. Louis, and the jetties at the river's mouth (in 1932 Deans of the American Colleges of Engineering named him one of the five greatest engineers of all time, ranking him with, among others, Leonardo DaVinci and Thomas Edison.) At South Pass, at the mouth of the river, Eads had made the river obey his will. To prevent floods he proposed cut-offs to straighten and speed the river. The increased speed could scour the bed, even during lower water. The concentration of the river's force would lower the bed so the river would carry more water, faster. By such correction, Eads declared, "floods can be permanently lowered," which would render levees superfluous.

But no cut-offs were dug. Nor was another idea, to build reservoirs on the tributaries to hold back the water. Nor were any outlets dug. The Corps of Engineers--and then the residents of the Valley--relied on levees only. At high water the river spread and rose even higher. In turn, the Corps raised the height of the levees, from two feet to 7.5 feet to as much as 38 feet. The Corps was confident that its levees-only system would hold in the river, and it so promised.
The levees failed. Here, there, sometimes it seemed everywhere, the river undercut the levees. Water poured through breaks called crevasses, covering with 30 feet of water land where nearly one million people lived. Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated. This was about equal to the combined size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont. By July 1, even as the flood began to recede, 1.5 million acres were under water. The river was 70 miles wide.
Still the rains came. The river rose higher. Most threatened was the Mississippi Delta, between Memphis and Vicksburg, possibly the richest, most fertile land in the country, perhaps in the world.

"Concentration Camps"

To save the land, frantic efforts to raise the levee by stacking sand bags on the top were begun. Charles Williams was an employee of former Mississippi Senator Le Roy Percy's on one of the largest cotton plantations in the Delta. He set up "concentration camps" on the levee protecting Greenville, complete with field kitchens and tents, for thousands of plantation workers--all African Americans--to live as the men handled sand bags.

The river, not the men, won the battles. On April 21 it broke through the levees. Major John C. H. Lee, the Army district engineer at Vicksburg (and in World War II in command of the Services of Supply in the European Theater of Operations--there the chief quartermaster and called by the enlisted men, who halted hated him, "Jesus Christ Himself Lee" wired the chief of the Corps of Engineers, General Edwin Jadwin, "Levee broke...crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta."
The crevasse, just upriver from Greenville was huge, a 100-foot channel half a mile in width. Water poured through, more than double the amount of Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper river ever. In 10 days it covered one million acres with water 10 feet deep--and the crevasse continued to pour water for months.

Panic. Hundreds of workers on the levee climbed into a barge below the break to escape. A tugboat tried to push the vessel downstream, but the flow through the crevasse pulled it upstream. One white man called out "Let's put all the ******s on the barge and cut it loose." Another man, Charlie Gibson, interceeded. "We ain't goin' to cut the barge loose. I'll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together."

Senator Percy's son Will, a World War I hero and a noted poet, took charge of the Red Cross relief efforts for the blacks stuck on the levee. His first impulse was to evacuate them on steamers.
The planters protested. They persuaded Le Roy Percy to instruct his son to leave those blacks on the levee. Cotton was the principal, indeed almost the only crop grown in the Delta. Cotton was labor intensive--it was planted, cultivated, and picked by hand. The planters grew rich because of it. The workers got $1 a day for their sunrise to sunset labor. The planters knew that if the blacks got out of the Delta, they would never return. They had nothing to come back to and anyplace was better than the Delta. Keep them here, the planters declared. Le Roy Percy backed them. Will Percy, after some feeble protests about putting their own economic welfare ahead of people's lives, gave in.
In 1942, those same planters, or their sons, paid the local police to patrol the Illionois Central railroad depots to prevent the blacks from getting on the train to go to Chicago, where they could get work at, for them, big wages, in the war industries. In 1944 the first cotton picking machine came to the Delta. By 1945, the planters were buying one-way tickets to Chicago for the blacks.
On the levee the blacks filled and stacked sandbags, for which Percy set a pay scale of 75 cents per day. Those who were put to unloading and distributing Red Cross food parcels, which were starting to come to Greenville by barge to feed 180,000 people and thousands of animals.
Percy ordered all Greenville blacks to the levee. The camp stretched seven miles. Percy ordered that all the Red Cross work be done for free. There were too few tents, not enough food, no eating utensils or mess hall. Black men were not allowed to leave--those who tried were driven back at gunpoint by the National Guard.

The food they received was inferior to what the whites got. Canned peaches came in, but were not distributed to blacks for fear it would "spoil them. Whites kept the good Red Cross food for themselves. Giving it to the blacks, one white man explained, "would simply teach them a lot of expensive habits."

In John Barry's judgement, the levee was not a labor camp, it was a slave camp.

[myrtlebdan]

I'm not from the Delta but I did attend Delta State University. I had made MANY friends that were Delta natives, many Greenville, and they were some of the best-looking, kindest, friendliest people I've met and still keep in touch with most of them today. Now, all those 'Delta kids' are currently raising NON 'Delta kids'....Most are either in Memphis area, Jackson or Atlanta.,...but what else is there to do as there are no jobs for most young adults who hold college degrees. While at DSU, I did spend some time in Greenville and though I've never 'lived' there, based on my limited experience, there is NO way I ever could...honestly, having lived in the MS Delta for 5 years (and combing the entire region while there) if I had to live anywhere there, it would be Cleveland,MS. I had a love/hate relationship with the Delta. As a white guy, I did experience some racial tension from blacks, and for no reason at all....but honestly, there is racism and crime everywhere one goes. But if you ask me, Greenville is not an 'ideal' place to raise a family....it may be for some folks, but not main-stream America....though there are many 'dying' towns ALL across the US, (not just MS) it's heartbreaking to see an entire region dwindle down in so many areas in the last 20 years or so...

[Grant_Hobgood]

You guys used to have a single weekend that brought in over 500k to the city from what I understand, but the locals took that and threw it away. Anyone remember Showfest? It's moved on to Tunica. The show goers were NOT the problem, regardless if you enjoyed the street-side party for a couple of nights or not. Good going Greenville. I will NEVER go back to Greenville, nor Cleveland.