THE DELTA 317 THE DELTA 317 PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY/HISTORIC AMERICAN ENGINEERING RECORD/HISTORIC AMERICAN LANDSCAPES SURVEY ISAIAH T. MONTGOMERY HOUSE Isaiah Montgomery was the son of Benjamin Montgomery, the initiator of the first African American colony at Davis Bend. When the colony at Davis Bend failed because of crop failure, flooding, and illness, Isaiah Montgomery founded Mound Bayou. This was the twenty-one bedroom home Montgomery built for his family in the self- segregated community at Mound Bayou. In the late 1870s, the Delta was still predominantly wilderness and swampland. The wild animals that roamed the region in the days of de Soto, French and British rule, and the early Mississippi Territory had gone nowhere. serving as a United States senator, a new day had arrived in Mississippi politics. There was no better symbol of this political revolution than Blanche K. Bruce. Bruce was born a slave, but his father, a white plantation owner, freed his son and sent him to Oberlin College in Ohio. He helped establish a school for African American children in Missouri. Following the Civil War, Bruce moved to Mississippi and acquired land in the Delta. He translated his material success into political power becoming Bolivar County sheriff, tax collector, and superintendent of education. He was eventually elected to the U.S. Senate in 1876, becoming the state’s second African American U.S. senator. Bruce served one term in the Senate and, in 1879, presided over the Senate’s proceedings, a first for an African American. By the time of his death in 1898, Bruce had worked as U.S. Register of the Treasury and as the recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. Republicans in Reconstruction-era Mississippi engendered many political, economic, and social changes in Mississippi and the Delta. This period, however, was short-lived. White Democrats launched a coordinated plan to eliminate Republican rule in the mid-1870s. Growing discontent over high taxes, political corruption, and fears of “Negro rule” helped unite white Democrats in a campaign of intimidation, fraud, and violence against African American and white Republicans. Although some offices were held by African Americans in the Delta until the 1890s, the overthrow of Republican rule in Mississippi gave white Delta elites the chance to regain the unbridled political power they once held. The end of Reconstruction led to a period of political, economic, and social decline for African Americans in the Delta. The period of Jim Crow would emerge in the aftermath of Reconstruction’s demise and become, as one historian has termed it, a “dark journey” for African Americans. New South Frontier In the late 1870s, the Delta was still predominantly wilderness and swampland. The wild animals that roamed the region in the days of de Soto, French and British rule, and the early Mississippi Territory had gone nowhere. Plantations had emerged during the first four decades of PHOTO BY GREG CAMPBELL