Robert Hampton contributes to the ongoing AmRen series about white flight in American cities by discussing the city named after the honourable Andrew Jackson.
Jackson, Mississippi, is no place for the white man — or for its namesake. Last year, its city council voted to remove the Andrew Jackson statue outside City Hall. There was only one vote against, from the council’s lone (white) Republican. Five blacks and a white Democrat woman voted to dump Old Hickory. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba celebrated the decision as a victory for blacks.
It's worth noting, by the way, that the notion that President Jackson was a man worthy of praise was a mainstream opinion a scant fifteen years ago. Just look at the Pirate-o-pedia entry for Jean Laffite from the 2004 remake of the Sid Meier's classic:
Hampton outlines the problem...
Businesses have been leaving for years. A local news article from 2003 lamented: “Downtown Jackson was once booming with business, but over the years businesses have slowly left. Today, there is only a skeleton of what once was.” That problem only gotten worse. Unlike most Southern cities, Jackson’s population has declined by more than 40,000 since 1980 and is now 155,000.Jackson’s last movie theater closed in the late 1990s, so you can’t watch a first-run movie anywhere. Sixty years earlier, when the city covered only one-third the land area it does today, it had a dozen movie theaters. This cinema desert has been the subject of academic research.Crime and terrible schools explain some of the decline. Last month, a city councilman called for the National Guard to patrol the city. In 2020, the city had a record 128 murders. That gave it the second highest rate in the nation at 80 per 100,000 residents (St. Louis is number one at 88 per 100,000). Jackson is set to break its 2020 record this year, with murders up 38 percent over the same period last year. Only two percent of murder cases since May 2018 have gone to trial, and fewer than half of the murders this year have resulted in an arrest.The schools are a mess. Jackson Public Schools typically get an “F” or “D” from the state and they barely avoided a state takeover in 2018. A report from that time found that only 20 percent of students were proficient in reading and writing and only 18 percent were proficient in math. Funding is not the problem; enrollment is falling and yet the budget remains the same.
You don't have to be a genius to guess at the cause:
Jackson wasn’t always like this. This 1961 documentary on the city’s battle with segregation shows what it once was. White couples walked the streets and business thrived. Jackson was a nice place to live — and watch a movie.In 1960, it was 64 percent white. Today, it’s only 16 percent white.
