Moving forward
Agrarian past gives way to jobs requiring new skills
Last Tuesday, on the Independent Bank building’s 17th floor, Glen Fenter stepped into a conference room dominated by a massive flat-screen television placed against one wall and windows offering a sweeping view of the Mississippi River.
For more than a generation, stricken towns and cities in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta have emptied of people as families moved up that river. Tens of thousands of these Delta families have blended into Memphis, shaping a unique city storied for its grit and determination, its music, food and soft-spoken humanity, and also chided as backward, ill-educat- ed for the 21st century, a city destined to fail in an America obsessed with technology.
Fenter for more than two decades headed a community college in West Memphis, but for the last two years he has dealt indirectly with the aftermath of the mass migration from a special location. His office is inside a Downtown skyscraper built for the old financial district’s silk-stocking bank, the National Bank of Commerce, whose patrons included prosperous Delta planters and Memphis merchants when the city was prominent on the world cotton routes.
Today, the cotton trade has faded, NBC is gone, the Delta lives precariously on corn and soybeans. Memphis has become a logistics, medical and tourism hub with too few jobs for the population, and home to a harried former college executive on the 17th floor of the I-Bank building.
He’s working toward the moment that massive television on the wall flips on and shows this: Videos of Memphians. Each tells their story of where they work and how they got there.
“We want to use role models in this community to change the misperception that there are not good jobs available for ordinary people,’’ Fenter said. With his soft drawl and white hair, Fenter looks like President Bill Clinton did in the 1990s.
In the White House, the former Arkansas governor helped launch the Delta Regional Authority to stem the poverty up and down the river.
But the under-funded federal agency fell short and the out-migration has continued.
Anyone who knows Memphis will tell you this city contains far more people than the families who came up from the Delta. But as University of Memphis economist John Gnuschke says, the steady trickle bolsters the 18.4-percent poverty rate.
As industrial-scale farming displaced farm hands, families left the Delta. Then factory jobs sagged. Between 1998 and 2014, nearly 70 of the 165 plants located in the five Mississippi Delta counties closest to metro Memphis closed. One in five jobs of all types vanished in the same counties. Greenville, regarded as a regal city when cotton prices surged during World War I, subsided to 32,700 residents by 2013, down 1,700 in three years.