Home » Opinions » Slimantics: Jackson’s water crisis dates back to integration

I t’s a damn poor farmer who starves his mule and then complains because it can’t pull the plow.

On Monday, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeve finally declared a state of emergency in the city of Jackson, where the water system is teetering on collapse.

This comes after it was revealed that the city’s main water treatment plant is failing, which could leave 180,000 Jacksonians without water.

This disaster did not happen overnight. Rather, what has happened is the inevitable outcome of a problem decades in the making. It is what happens after years of deferred maintenance and failure to invest in repairs and upgrades to an aging water system.

In the winter of 2021, the city’s water system began showing clear signs of failure — 43,000 residents had no running water at all for two weeks. Repeated boil-water orders that have followed were a foreshadowing of what is happening now.

But there is another factor involved in sowing the seeds of this disaster that state leaders like Reeves don’t like to acknowledge: White flight, which is of course, a polite term for racism.

In 1970, when Mississippi was finally forced to integrate its schools, white residents began fleeing the city. Jackson Public Schools saw 10,000 students leave in the first year of school integration, some to newly established private schools like Jackson Prep and Jackson Academy, but far more to neighboring Rankin and Madison counties.

By 2020, the city had lost 20 percent of its population, roughly 40,000 residents after an initial wave of white residents left to avoid putting their children in integrated schools. Half of the decline occurred in the last two decades as more middle-class Black families moved, and the city’s white population continued to drop from 52 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2019, according to U.S. Census data.

Today, the city is 82 percent black. A quarter of its residents live below the poverty level.

A declining population and sinking property values left the city with a shrinking tax base even as the need for substantial investment in the city’s infrastructure increased. Outside investment in Jackson is at a virtual standstill.

“And we all know why,” activist Laurie Bertram Roberts told Mississippi Today in 2021. “Nobody wants to invest in Jackson because of who runs Jackson and who lives in Jackson. Because white folks don’t dominate here anymore.”

Until Monday, state leaders’ view was that the city’s problems were caused by the city’s Black leadership. And even in acknowledging that the state must now act to protect the state’s most populous city, there is an undertone of blaming current city leaders for a problem that began when most of the city’s leaders were children. It’s the insidious “why should we have to clean up the mess these Black folks have made?” attitude.

It wasn’t until the “right kind of people” began to complain that state leaders were compelled to act, something House Speaker Philip Gunn revealed.

“I’ve been contacted by hospitals, businesses, and schools pleading that something be done to address the water crisis in Jackson,” Gunn said in a statement Monday. “Unfortunately, the city leadership has not presented a permanent solution or a comprehensive plan. These groups have turned to the state for help, and it seems we will have to evaluate what options might be available.”

Current city leadership bears their share of responsibility, but the larger forces at work for more than 50 years should not be ignored.

Segregation has been starving the mule all these years. The result of that is plain to see.

And to think, it all began because the idea of a white child sitting next to a Black child in school was too much to tolerate.

The frightening thing is that there are a lot of cities in our state which may someday suffer the same consequences we see today in Jackson.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is ssmith@cdispatch.com.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is ssmith@cdispatch.com.

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