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Friend,
James Ray has been busy over the last couple of weeks.
The house on Front Street in Silver City, Mississippi, that his father left him 18 years ago is still a shambles. Pieces of tin roofing curl up toward the sky where the winds from an EF4 tornado tried to rip them from the joists. In many places the wind won, leaving the bare timbers open to the sky and the house defenseless against the elements.
On this particular day, just over two weeks after the March 24-25 tornado traced a path of destruction from nearby Rolling Fork through Silver City and across the Yazoo River, Ray is tearing down the remnants of a shed, the remaining two-by-fours of its walls nailed to two pilings standing upright about 6 feet out of the ground.
“I just keep working,” Ray said. “It’s got to get done.”
The unsaid part of that is “by me.” Although the destruction the tornado wreaked along the 170-mile path dominated media last month, the help needed to recover has been slow in arriving.
“These are the two poorest counties [Sharkey and Humphreys, where the bulk of the damage occurred] in the state of Mississippi, which is the poorest state in the country,” said Rob Gaudet, a site coordinator operating a recovery center in Rolling Fork for the nonprofit Cajun Navy relief organization. “So that makes these the poorest counties in the United States. It’s a real problem, and Americans aren’t paying attention to it.”
Waikinya Clanton, the Mississippi state office director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that is not a surprise.
“I think that is a common thing, right?” Clanton said. “The news cycle is predicated on the news of the day. Unfortunately, here in America we are subject to a number of different things. While we were working on the recovery in Rolling Fork, there was another tornado that cut across the South in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sometimes the attention does shift depending on what is happening in the world.”
Staffers from the SPLC’s Mississippi state office have been on the ground in the tornado-torn area since day one, helping to bring resources and support to the Delta region in the aftermath of the storm – including funding, supplies, organizational help and direct assistance to families and local governments in the tornado’s path.
An ongoing crisis
On this day, Red Cross volunteers and vehicles can be seen crisscrossing the streets in Rolling Fork, bringing water and aid to people who are trying to recover what they can and repair damaged homes. Contractors are hauling load after load of debris to dump sites, clearing away tons of fallen trees, bricks, lumber and other pieces of neighborhood homes crushed in the storm.
But the depth of the destruction is immense. Standing on U.S. Highway 61, which bifurcates the town, the debris field extends as far as the eye can see in every direction.
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Sincerely,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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