Replies

Admittedly the history of the Mississippi Delta was very much different from that of Northern industrial cities like Detroit. THe book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America well documents the blacks were forced at gunpoint to work on the levees and received scant relief supplies compared with the white minority. Interestingly, the plantation owners had a sense of noblesse oblige toward the black majority that shielded them to some degree from the wrath of lower income whites, from which law enforcement officers and Ku Klux Klan members were recruited. Places like Detroit and Chicago were escape valves for blacks suffering from poverty and raw treatment from the dominant white minority in the Mississippi Delta.

There are old grievances dating back to the 19th and early to mid 20th Centuries, and blacks, like Irish and Jews, do not forget their past oppression. Unlike the Jews and a lesser extent the Irish, blacks by and large have wallowed in their past and not overcome the legacy of that past. Not that Jews or Irish are perfect. The Jews took a lot of land from the Palestinians, often unjustly, and the population of Irish Protestants dropped sharply after the Irish Republic was established. However, Ireland and Israel are first world countries with high per capital incomes. Jewish Americans are the most prosperous group in this country. Irish Americans (excluding the Scots-Irish of Appalachia) are relatively high income.

Is it genetic or attitudinal? I don't know. But the difference undeniably exists.