The Durant news. (Durant, Miss.) 1882-1985, 1940-07-11
A ~Southerner Speaks

A Southerner Speuks
Mark Ethridge, outstanding Missssippi-born news,
paper man, has no illusions concerning the south ana
its peoples.
He recently made the statement; "The South is the
home of a people unhappily circumstanced economically;
a people who must have a reconstruction.
Unthinking southern people are inclined to make
light of this statement thinking that talk OF reconstruc-
ton in a section of the country as rich as the south is
nothing short of ridiculous.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The south
has made nothing OF It's opportunities compared
what it could and should.
While we have more than a third of the good farming
land in the country, although we are less than a third
of the nation, the south has 81 percent of all the land
badly damaged by erosion. 1t is estimated that more
than $500, 600, 900 worth of top soil is washed away
every year. More than half the hand in the south is
cultivated by tenants or sharecroppers This, in a way,
condemns our carelessness.
The South's percentage of illiterates is almost 9
against 2 for the rest of the country. The average farmer
has a gross income income of $186 per year in COM
parison with 1923 for farmers elsewhere. Our health
records are the worst in the country mostly because
from 60 to GO percent of the families of low income
groups are unable to buy food for adequate diet, partly
because measures taken by public health services are
more limited here than other sections.
Mr.. Ethridge says:
1T is not the erosion of our soil which has been
the most tragic consequence of our own folly with a
one-crop system, and Of the nations unwise economic
and political policy towards US as expressed in tariff
and freight rates; the most tragic consequence has
been the degradation and erosion of human beings that
has accompanied it."
1--WE stand at the bottom of the list in the attainment
of almost all of those boOms of civilization which were
to come out of the settlement of this new continent"
No Peosuntry?
He added: "As long as people live as they do on
some of the farms in the Deep South, no orator in the
Y. S. can beat his breast and say, THANK God we have
no peasantry." ! spent six months in Central Europe and
1 never saw peasants live under conditions I have seen
in the South"
Mr.. Ethridge termed the South in effect a Colonial
Possession of the United States"
'Our brothers of the Northeast" he pointed out,
forged the shackles of tariff and wage discrimination
which we cannot now strike from ourselves; which, IN
fact, can be stricken only when the whole nation re-
cognizes the injustice of the situation.
81 would not for an instant maintain that all that
has been done was done in the vicious spirit of economic
oppression and repression; all / say is that the industrial
east has done such a magnificent job of looking after
itself in freight rates and tariff. that, although it is the
smallest regional area of the country, although it pro-
duces less of raw materials, it turns out more than II
per cent lin value) of all goods manufactured in the
country, while the South makes S.5 per cent. Until fun
damental conditions are changed, we cannot become
anything but a feeder of raw products to be manufac-
tured in the Industrial East.