The storied history of the Mississippi Delta deep in the heart of the American South is one that cannot be told solely in black and white, with many descendants seeking to draw attention to the often overlooked contribution of Chinese laborers to these communities.
Greenville, the most populous city in the Mississippi Delta, became the unlikely destination for Chinese migrants. After the American Civil War, cotton plantation owners, desperate to fill the void left by departing African American laborers, began recruiting workers from the Far East to toil in their fields.
The Chinese workers quickly discovered that cotton farming offered no long-term path to survival and pivoted towards a more sustainable business practice as they began to open up grocery stores in Black neighborhoods.
At its peak, Greenville - then a city of just around 40,000 people - was home to more than 50 of these Chinese-owned grocery stores, which became essential hubs of the community.
Today, a Chinese cemetery in Greenville, which dates back more than a century, stands as a silent testimony to that era, where some of the people who played their part in these communities can be remembered.
"My parents and that generation, I knew all of them having a grocery store. Back then there was segregation, so the whites did not like the Blacks or the Asians, Chinese. They didn't intermingle, nobody intermingled, they just found it more lucrative to be in a Black neighborhood. They gave them credit or just helped them out," said Cathy Wong, the person-in-charge of the Greenville Chinese Cemetery.
While the cemetery pays a quiet tribute, the stories are more vividly presented at the Delta State University in Mississippi, where a collection of archives holds a trove of documents chronicling the lives of early Chinese residents in the state.
A special heritage museum set up inside the Charles W. Capps Jr. Archives and Museum building recreates scenes from these past Chinese grocery stores in Greenville. It displays old photographs, signs and items, as well as recordings of the oral history - preserving the lesser-known stories of the Chinese-run groceries that were once dotted along nearly every small town from the Mississippi River to the Arkansas Delta.
On a land where racial segregation once drew rigid boundaries between the white and black population, the Chinese existed between the cracks, nearly invisible amid these wider divisions. But the museum and the precious artifacts it contains highlight the important role they played in everyday life during a past chapter of history.
Story of often overlooked Chinese laborers in Mississippi Delta
