Gambling Pays Off for County--but Not for Many Inhabitants

TUNICA COUNTY, Miss. — When the 1990s dawned, Tunica County was still a slice of the developing world stuck right here in the United States, its per capita income lower than Greece’s, its life expectancy shorter than Cuba’s.

Then in 1991, the county Board of Supervisors took a bet that riverboat gambling could turn all that around. Faster than you could say “jackpot,” a wall of investment money and tax revenue hit Tunica.

Eight years and $3.5 billion later, the county has, improbably, become the third-largest gambling mecca in the United States--after Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Some 16,000 new jobs sprang up in a county of just 8,000 souls. You would be forgiven for thinking that Tunica’s financial misery is a thing of the past.

But is it?

True, fast cars hum by on Tunica County’s newly paved and widened highways--but they leave grim rows of boarded-up storefronts in their wake. Pretty new brick houses are going up in a suburban subdivision in the north end of the county--but just across the road, rotting sharecropper shacks still stand.

No Share in the Boom

Gloria Williams, who recently moved from one of those shacks to a subsidized apartment, can name no benefits the casino boom has brought her. “All we get is what they’re putting up around us,” she says with a wave toward the landscaped subdivision houses, so close yet so hopelessly beyond her reach.

Poverty can’t be cured without money, but when money does miraculously arrive, it brings problems of its own. How to make the wealth grow? How to get it to the people who need it most? Those questions are the subject of intense, even paralyzing, debate in Tunica County.

“From Day 1, there has been a real backlash of people who were asking who was going to control the resources,” says Ronald Love, the state-appointed conservator of Tunica County’s public schools. “We don’t have a businesslike mentality for deciding how to use the resources.”

Which is not to say that growth here is sputtering, or that all of Tunica County’s poor still live on the dingy side of the street. The median income has doubled since gambling arrived, and public assistance has plunged. It is easy to find former welfare recipients who enjoy paychecks, health insurance, even 401(k) plans.

But despite the influx of two jobs for every resident of Tunica County, unemployment remains higher than the national average. Of every seven casino-job applicants from Tunica, only one is deemed fit to join the work force; the other six lack even the basic habits--neatness, punctuality, eye contact--necessary to hold down almost any job.

Even those who find work typically strip beds and bus tables for less than $20,000 a year. The better-paid jobs tend to go to better-heeled and better-educated commuters from Memphis, 15 miles north.

At the moment, the crossroads where Gloria Williams is standing--the hamlet of Robinsonville, with its jarring juxtaposition of shacks and suburbia--is Ground Zero in Tunica County’s debate over how best to manage its new wealth. At issue are plans to tear down the rest of the dilapidated sharecropper houses, relocate the residents, build hundreds more of the inviting brick homes and set a new public school smack in the middle of it all.

Only nine of the new houses are standing so far. The rest of the land is still thick in cotton and discord.

Building a middle-class neighborhood here, advocates argue, will ultimately help all of Tunica County’s poor. It will encourage some of the better-off casino employees--the ones with the better-paying jobs, who now commute from Memphis--to move here, bringing with them their bank accounts, their work ethic, their higher-achieving schoolchildren.

The newcomers will demand all manner of goods and services, and local entrepreneurs will go into business supplying them. All this will speed Tunica County on its transition from an impoverished, segregated backwater to a colorblind bastion of middle-class prosperity. Or so the argument goes.

And it isn’t just white bankers and developers making the case, but also some big names with impeccable civil-rights credentials. There is Reuben Anderson, Mississippi’s first African American supreme court justice, who litigated for the plaintiffs in 80% of the state’s school-desegregation cases in the late 1960s. And there’s Mike Moore, Mississippi’s New Democrat attorney general, who filed the first statewide lawsuit against the tobacco companies.

Some heavyweights are lining up on the other side as well. The Justice Department’s civil rights division head, Bill Lann Lee, has blocked the development plans on the grounds that they could promote racial segregation.

It wasn’t always a big-league game. When gambling came to Tunica County, it consisted of a single converted barge called the Splash, docked where a two-lane country road ran down to the Mississippi River. By law, casinos in the state of Mississippi must be on navigable waters. The Splash succeeded so well that the big corporate gambling concerns dug holes in the cotton fields of northern Tunica County, pumped in water, built floating casinos and called them riverboats.

Most of northern Tunica County is still planted in cotton and soybeans, but every so often up jumps a casino. Then, as the blacktop ends, the empty, table-flat cotton land resumes.

That’s the trouble with Tunica County’s casino boom, analysts say. In a normal community, all manner of businesses--shops, restaurants, aerobics studios, hair salons, video rentals--serve middle-class residents and their activities. But not in Tunica County.

“It’s like we’re throwing a party and nobody’s attending,” says Tunica County Planning Commission Director Greg Hurley. It’s a vicious circle: Because there was no real middle-class here before, there is no middle-class housing now, which means no new middle-class people can move in.

How to break out of this cycle? Cotton planter C. Penn Owen Jr., who owns the fields spreading out around Robinsonville, rezoned his farmland and drew up the plans for a 250-house subdivision. Up went the first nine houses, selling at $100,000 to $120,000 each. Owen could find buyers for only two.

Turned Off by Schools

Tunica County’s public schools were a big part of the reason. Thirty years ago, when a federal court ordered the schools desegregated, most whites enrolled in their own private schools, where they remain today. Of the 2,000 children in Tunica’s public schools, 1,940 are African American.

A decade ago, when per-pupil spending in Tunica had slid to the lowest in Mississippi, the governor took over the schools.

Although new money and new management have since made impressive changes, prospective out-of-town home buyers still put the schools high on their list of reasons for not moving in.

So Owen, the would-be developer, offered the county a tract of his Robinsonville subdivision for a new school. The county snapped up the tract and allocated $5 million for construction. This, it was hoped, would get Owen’s new-home sales moving again and bring new credibility to Tunica’s public schools.

But to Tunica County’s long-suffering black majority, the new school looked like an elitist project that would enrich mainly Owen, who is white, and cater to middle-class children from somewhere else. “If our school system isn’t good enough for [middle class] children to go to, then it’s not good enough for mine,” insists community activist Joe Eddie Hawkins.

The U.S. Justice Department, which retained authority to enforce the court desegregation order, rejected the proposed Robinsonville school because it “foreseeably could become predominantly white within a relatively short period of time.”

In a defiant response, state Atty. Gen. Moore wrote U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno that a panel of “independent experts” had found that this “is not a black/white issue.” Declaring that it was time to pull the plug on “a 30-year-old, moribund desegregation case,” he told Reno that he had advised Tunica County to build its new school, federal permission or not.

Tunica County activist Melvin Young says the image of a top state official urging Tunica County to go around the Justice Department takes him back to the early 1960s, when Gov. Ross Barnett tried to block school desegregation. He says whites are now trying to retake control of the schools.

“They have the police department already,” adds his wife, Marilyn. “They have the fire department. They have the hospital. All they need is the school.”

In Tunica County today, the scent of money not yet made hangs thick in the air. Bulldozers stand poised for action. For-sale signs dot empty fields.

Local black residents who choose to live in the middle-class development are called lackeys by those who think such a development will only perpetuate the old injustices of the Mississippi Delta. The Justice Department is urging Tunica County to build its new school somewhere besides Robinsonville. The county says no way--it has already bought the Robinsonville tract and laid costly water lines.

Earlier this month, the Tunica school district went to federal court, moving to end Justice Department supervision. Tunica County has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create a middle class, officials say, to solidify the gains of the casino boom and make them last. Besides, who can stand in the way of the market forces that dictate so much of what happens in America today?

“We all want to do what’s best for Tunica County,” says Hurley, the head of the county planning commission. “What’s best for Tunica County is a school in the north end, where the development is about to happen.”