The Deep South's Paralyzing Intergenerational Poverty

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33011-the-deep-souths-paralyzing-intergenerational-poverty

The 86 members of Ruleville Central’s senior class had attended a school given an F grade by the state. Nearly everybody qualified for government-provided lunches. The school was so strapped for teachers that in 2014 it brought in seven from India — during the middle of the year — to instruct math and science classes.

And then, with graduation, those students walked out the door.

Some new graduates went off to local colleges. Others lacked money or test scores. One turned down an offer from his dream school — the University of Mississippi — because of the cost. Another who had bragged about an awaiting football scholarship ended up working at a truck stop. The school’s guidance counselor said she can count on her hand the ones who will finish college.

Here in the Deep South, poverty perpetuates from generation to generation like in no other region of the country, data shows, and the obstacles that hold back new high school graduates shine a light on a vast economic struggle that differs in its expansiveness from the concentrated problems seen in urban hubs.

In recent years, shriveling job prospects for the high-school-educated and scant state support for the poor have combined with the Deep South’s more timeworn problems — single-parenthood and under-education — to diminish the chances of a middle-class life for somebody born into poverty. In Mississippi, if high school graduates don’t advance to college, they have a 77 percent chance, compared with 67 percent nationally, that their children will grow up poor, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. Such odds, which have been rising since 2008, represent the steepest in the nation, and Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia (along with Arkansas and New Mexico) are just behind.

Poverty rates in the South spiked higher in the aftermath of the recession and have been far slower to recover, rising to levels last seen three decades ago. And the young have endured the brunt of the pain. In 2000, the states of the Deep South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina — all had child poverty rates worse than the national average, but they were spread loosely among the bottom half on a list of all states. Now, those five states have sunk to the bottom.

[Recursion]

1. I hate to name drop, but: the one time I met Isabel Wilkerson....

I asked her about a point she made in The Warmth of Other Suns where she pointed out that the African American migrants in the Great Migration had higher aggregate educational attainment than:

1. The black people already in the north
2. The white people already in the north
3. The black people who stayed in the south
4. The white people in the south

This was literally a migration of immense scale that involved moving the most highly educated cohort from the South to the North, West, and Midwest. So I asked her how much of the South's seemingly intractable poverty comes from that fact, that we chased our most educated cohort out over the course of 60 years.

She wasn't ready to commit to that, but she said that somebody should study it. I would really like to see somebody do that.

[eridani]

2. A very good point n/t

[Hortensis]

3. Here's a big factor.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1484

Around me in north rural Georgia, most people who are not Southern Baptist belong to even more fundamentalist religions.

Here's another from fivethirtyeight.com:
?w=610&h=474

And,