Blog Book, New Post #9; Anthropologist, Social Psychologist Study Mississippi Delta in 1930s

(Juke Joint in Indianola. Photo By Susan Klopfer)

In the mid 1930s, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker and social psychologist John Dollard, both white Yale colleagues at the Institute of Human Relations, traveled into the Delta to study Indianola and nearby Sunflower, making the Sunflower County seat historically significant as the site of the first anthropological studies on non-Native people in the United States.

Their classic ethnographies, Powdermaker's “After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South” and Dollard's “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” contributed to a “master narrative” of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and the South that viewed class largely through the lens of race.

When we were living in the Delta, I learned that a secret copy of the Powdermaker study was tucked away in an office at Parchman Penitentiary for safe keeping but couldn't ever get anyone to show it to me!

Powdermaker’s field observations during her study of Indianola, the town she called Cottonville, were stunning. In her first few weeks, blacks told her of an incident when the black janitor of a white school was lynched after reporting some of the pupils to the schools principal for throwing stones at school windows.

She noted how moods shifted within the white community regarding the possibility of a lynching. One day after a lynching attempt, the researcher journaled her impressions:

[A] group of shabby men, their eyes burning, tramped up and down the road and through the woods, mingling their oaths with the barking of their dogs. The middle-class white men sitting in their offices or homes remarked that of course they did not approve of lynching, but that undoubtedly these Negroes would be lynched, and "what can you do when you have to deal with the primitive African type, the killer?" The Negroes in the neighborhood sat at home all day, afraid to go out. Those in a town thirty miles distant said that things must be getting better because a few years ago, if the mob had not found the men they wanted by this time, they would have lynched someone else.

Powdermaker theorized that lynching encouraged blacks to commit violent acts against other blacks “… because the black person can hope for no justice and no defense from our legal institutions" and therefore must settle his own difficulties, "and often he knows only one way."

Dollard’s separate work led to development of a theory of “frustration aggression” through life histories he collected from nine middle-class African Americans. In their respective studies, both scientists stressed the importance of voting and of the deep injustice of the forced caste division they observed.