It is for all practical purposes an all African American town and it has no financial tax base. For this:
The median household income is just $12,806 a year. Nationally it was $53,915 in 2012. Unemployment is officially about 25%, but in practice only about one in four adults in Tchula has a regular job. Most employment is seasonal. More than 60% of families live below the poverty line.
Tchula lies within Holmes County which, depending on the year, either has the lowest life expectancy in the country or is near the bottom. In 2010, a man could expect to live just 67.9 years, nearly a decade below the national average and lower than in Indonesia and Guatemala. Men in Fairfax County, Virginia – where the median household income is above $108,000 a year – have a life expectancy of nearly 82.
“Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate of any state,” said Dr Ronald Myers, who established a clinic for low-income families in Tchula in 1988. “When I got here, it didn’t take a rocket genius to see the reason the healthcare was so bad, that the infant mortality rate was so high. There were mothers who were eight months pregnant before they saw a doctor, if they saw a doctor at all. That’s a product for infant mortality disaster.
When I read about this place, I could not believe that such a place a place could exist in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
When the US speaks of violation of human rights, it needs to look inward to Tchula.
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