This article is absolutely fascinating and depressing at the same time. St. Louis has experienced its own form of White Flight with folks moving from the city to county,[footnote]Or even further West with St. Charles, Lincoln, and Warren counties experiencing explosive growth over the past few decades[/footnote] which, to this day, still keeps the area pretty segregated, a point that was seen quite vividly with the Michael Brown case.

After emancipation, plantation owners relied upon sharecroppers to grow and harvest their crops. To keep the system in place, white leaders studiously kept out industries that might lure their laborers away from agriculture, as historian James Cobb reported in his seminal book about the Delta, The Most Southern Place on Earth.