Plowing New Ground In The Delta

CEO Charles Bannerman learned that the most effective social activism is a healthy bottom line.

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When the Mississippi soybeans grow high late in the summer you can can drive down U.S. Highway 61 and barely see Mound Bayou Manufacturing Co.'s blue prefab plant just a few hundred yards off the road.

The plant, which takes its name from the town, makes bicycle wheels. It is the only factory this all-black Delta town of 2,913 has ever had, and summer is usually its busy season. But not the summer of '82. Mound Bayou's parent company had ended any rigorous marketing of bicycle wheels. Indeed, management was thinking of abandoning the wheel business altogether and using the Mound Bayou plant to assemble cockroach traps, which would require fewer people, show a better profit potential, and help the parent corporation's sagging bottom line.

"We have to put our money into areas where there is growth potential," explained Charles Bannerman, chairman and chief executive officer of the parent, Delta Enterprises Inc. "We can't afford any more slim margins. "

Conventional business judgments come easily to Bannerman today, but 13 years ago he would have been shocked to hear himself put profit margins ahead of jobs. To begin with, in 1969 Bannerman didn't know what a profit margin was. He and a group of liberal social activists were about to tap federal grants and private charities for money to create a jobs program for black workers. Along the way, though, the jobs program turned into a for-profit business, Bannerman became a businessman, and a small but growing number of Mississippi blacks began speaking a business language only white men spoke there not many years before.

When Bannerman arrived in Greenville, Miss., in 1967, he had a political science degree from Ohio State University. After college he had taken a job in the Franklin, Ohio, welfare office and spent much of his time organizing fellow employees into a union. The Washington, D.C. -- based Citizens Crusade Against Poverty had hired and dispatched him to Mississippi in 1967 to start a training program for community organizers. He arrived wearing an Afro and a dashiki tunic.

The country was waging Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had existed for two years, and southern blacks were organizing themselves politically. Equal-opportunity laws made job discrimination on racial grounds illegal. The South was changing, and Bannerman, a Harlem native, had come to the blackest part of the South, the Mississippi Delta, to hurry that change along.

Using federal money and grants from private foundations, civil rights activists in Mississippi were busy setting up community health clinics, getting Head Start programs under way, building new housing to replace rural shanties and sheds, and registering black voters. Admirable work, but, as Bannerman says, "In 1969 there were still 250,000 blacks walking around the Mississippi Delta with nothing to do. It occurred to some of us that the equal-opportunity laws we had passed wouldn't be any good to anyone if there was no work."

The national economy was performing well at the time, but the Mississippi Delta, like Appalaehia and the Ozarks, is a pocket of persistent poverty. It is ironic that most of the Delta's people are so poor precisely because the land there is so rich.

The Delta is that part of northwest Mississippi, starting just below Memphis, that runs south along the twisting Mississippi River to Vicksburg, 200 miles away. East and south of the Delta, Mississippi is hilly. Delta land, lake-flat, is rich and black, laid down in thousands and thousands of annual river floods to a depth of 35 feet in places. It is cotton land, the best there is.

In the 1830s white planters from states to the east and north had brought black slaves and mules to clear the forests, to build the levees, and to plant and pick the cotton. In the 1930s, when tractors became affordable, they laid off the mules. In the 1960s, when the mechanical cotton picker was perfected, they laid off the blacks.

There was no industry in the Delta and no trained labor force to attract industry. In the middle of the twentieth century, the average Delta black felt as at home in a factory as the average auto worker would feel today in an unplowed field with a hoe and a bag of soybean seeds.

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