INDEED, the biggest transformation in the Delta, the arrival of legalized gambling, wasn’t even addressed by the commission.
In 1990, the state of
Mississippi authorized riverboat casinos along “Old Man River” and the
Gulf of Mexico coast, enacting one of the most liberal gaming laws in the nation. Tunica became the first Delta county to jump aboard, beginning an unprecedented land rush and the construction of giant mega-gaming palaces. Today, Tunica County has nine casinos, and it remains one of the nation’s top gambling destinations. “America’s Ethiopia” has attracted as many as 14 million visitors a year since casinos opened; gaming has generated more than $40 million a year in tax revenues for the county, according to Lyn Arnold, president of the Tunica County Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Foundation. It has paid for new schools, new roads and sewers, an airport with an 8,500-foot runway, a health-and-wellness center, three community centers, and many other amenities.
From the beginning, there have been clear winners in the gambling game. The landowners who unloaded flood-prone acreage made out like bandits. A
Memphis businessman made a fortune by locking up billboard rights along U.S. 61 in the early 1990s; a Texas-based media conglomerate owns the signs now. The region’s media still lean heavily on casino advertising.
But like any game of chance, there have been losers too. While some tourists who go to the casinos visit nearby Memphis to see Elvis Presley’s Graceland and the clubs on
Beale Street, the
Tennessee city has trouble competing due to the lack of the draw of gambling. W.W. Herenton, who resigned as Memphis’s mayor this July after an unprecedented 17 years in office, pushed for legalized gaming in Tennessee, hoping to stanch the loss of tax revenue, but he couldn’t overcome the resistance from lawmakers in Nashville.
But if Herenton was looking for a magic bullet to solve the city’s socioeconomic troubles, he may have been looking in the wrong place.
In her 2006 study of the Delta, Sharon Wright Austin, PhD, associate professor of political science at the University of
Florida (and a Memphis native), says the casinos haven’t solved the deep-seated problems of the region. Austin presented evidence in her book, The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta, that contradicted the spin gaming promoters had peddled as gospel.
Casinos, she found, didn’t have much of a positive impact outside Tunica County; moreover, even in Tunica, they really didn’t address the structural problems of poverty. Because of the relatively low wages paid to employees, casinos did little more than transform the unemployed poor into the working poor, she says.
“Before the casinos opened, unemployment in Tunica County was always in the double-digits, even exceeding 20 percent. But it was always the case, during the period I researched, [that] even though unemployment was low, people were still poor and the poverty rate was high,” Austin says.