During Reconstruction, cotton planters in the Mississippi Delta recruited Chinese laborers to work on their plantations, to replace the emancipated slaves who had previously done the hard labor. However, the Chinese workers quickly learned that they couldn’t earn enough money picking cotton to send back to their families, and they turned instead to running small grocery stores, filling a niche in the market of the Deep South. At one point, the city of Greenville, Mississippi, had 40,000 residents and 50 Chinese-owned grocery stores. Although the numbers of Chinese Americans living in the Mississippi Delta region had dwindled now, their legacy remains.

Joining me to help us learn about this history is filmmaker and musician Larissa Lam, director of the 2021 documentary Far East Deep South, which follows her husband’s family as they search for their own lost family history in the Mississippi Delta. 

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Image Credit: “In the Mississippi Delta. There is an ever-increasing number of Chinese grocerymen and merchants.” Marion Post Wolcott, photographer. Leland, Mississippi, 1939. The photograph is courtesy of the Library of Congress and is in the Public Domain. Audio Credit: “The First Day,” by Larissa Lam, from the 2015 album Love & Discovery, Label: LOG Records/Del Oro Music. Song clip used with permission of the artist.

 

Additional Sources:

• “The Legacy Of The Mississippi Delta Chinese,” Melissa Block and Elissa Nadworny, NPR, March 18, 2017.
• “Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society,” Charles Reagan Wilson, Mississippi History Now, November 2022.
• “Neither Black Nor White in the Mississippi Delta: Two photographers document a community of Chinese-Americans in the birthplace of the blues,” James Estrin, The New York Times, March 13, 2018.
• “The Grocery Story of the Mississippi Delta Chinese,” Victoria Bouloubasis, Somewhere South, April 13, 2020.
• Mississippi Delta Chinese: Life in Chinese Grocery Stores.
• “Op-Ed: How African Americans and Chinese immigrants forged a community in the Delta generations ago,” by Larissa Lam, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2021.

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