The legacy of systemic racism in the rural South

April Simpson reports out of Mississippi for the Center for Public Integrity under the headline,  "In the Rural South, Poor Health Tied to Systemic Racism and Legacy of Slavery."  

The legacy of slavery looms large in the rural South.

After the Civil War, Jim Crow and a sharecropping system robbed Blacks of wealth and power. Violence and other government-sponsored segregation disenfranchised many Black Southerners until a critical triumph of the Civil Rights movement — the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That same year, Medicaid was born.

But Southern politicians of the time opposed civil rights legislation. Making Medicaid a state-run program helped to address their concerns about federal overreach.

In the South, racism and poor health have always been linked.

“The ill health of African descendants, and a lot of poor whites for that matter, is directly tied to these economics, racial discrimination and white-controlled systems that emerged from slavery through Jim Crow through sharecropping through Jim Crow today,” said Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-Clifford M. Boxley, a local historian based in Natchez, a port city along the banks of the Mississippi River in southwest Mississippi.

Simpson reports that in the coming weeks, the Center will explore the differences between two Black communities, one in rural Mississippi and one in Louisiana, the latter the only state in the Deep South to have expanded Medicaid.