HURRICANE KATRINA Poor Mississippi Delta towns overwhelmed by evacuees

Most towns have no jobs for the new arrivals.
MIDNIGHT, Miss. (AP) -- Like many towns across the Southern Delta, Midnight is little more than a faded general store, a towering cotton gin, a Baptist church and shotgun homes scattered along a few narrow streets.
Row houses with peeling paint, sagging facades and tired wooden boards are clustered between the cotton fields.
Before Hurricane Katrina, these towns already struggled with poverty. For years they have waited for better jobs, decent housing, good schools. Now, damaged themselves from the storm, they are trying to cope with an influx of thousands of unemployed, homeless new residents who fled the hurricane.
"We were suffering before that damn hurricane came," said Stanley Bates, a man with cramped, worn hands who has worked years in the cotton fields for $5.15 an hour.
Hundreds of evacuees
New Orleans and coastal Mississippi and Alabama were Katrina's most obvious casualties, but the predominantly black, perennially poor Delta region also is suffering. Overnight, populations grew by the hundreds in the towns that were the end of the road for evacuees who went as far as they could on a tank of gas. Now, evacuees are seeking help from towns that can barely help themselves.
Lake Providence, La., a community of 5,000 residents, swelled by 1,000 in the days leading up to and following Katrina. Mayor Isaac Fields said he had no idea so many were coming. After all, Lake Providence is 280 miles from New Orleans, and there's not much waiting when you get there.
There were 200 people on a waiting list for affordable housing before the hurricane. The town has the highest unemployment rate in the state, and those who are lucky enough to have jobs work in the cotton industry or government.
"We want anybody who wants to stay to stay," Fields said. "But we don't have the jobs to offer them."
Economic changes
In the height of the cotton industry, workers never made much, but they could usually find work. Now, workers like Bates have seen the cotton season dwindle from four months to three weeks. Economic changes and technical advances in the farming industry since the Great Depression of the 1930s destroyed the availability of cotton work, and nothing arrived to replace it.
"As agriculture declined and as machines took over, the Delta became increasingly poor," Jackson State University economics professor McKinley Alexander said. "The people who remained were either elderly or least prepared to enter the work force."
High poverty level
According to 2000 U.S. Census figures interpreted by the Mississippi Urban Research Center at Jackson State University, at least a third of the nearly 454,000 people living in the Delta's 18 counties are below poverty level. In some counties it is as much as 40 percent. The national average is about 12 percent.
Most of the homes here are at least 25 or 30 years old, and worth an average of $56,000 -- less than half the national average home value. Thirteen of the counties are more than 50 percent black. Nationally, blacks average household income is $29,423, compared to $44,867 for whites.
Quick-fix money given to evacuees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or aid from charities could create a temporary boom in towns where evacuees have landed, but the money will soon run out, Alexander said.
"What's going to happen if these people choose to settle in and remain there?" Alexander said.
But the plantation legacy also created a village mentality in these towns that makes those who have the least the most generous. Here, they say, you give what you have to those who need it more.