Negotiates Bureaucracy to Bring Housing Grant : Mayor’s Persistence Wins for Mississippi Community’s Elderly

MAYERSVILLE, Miss. â€”  Until recently, 72-year-old Amy Pittman lived in a shack with holes in the floor and a bucket for a toilet. The porch, she said, “was leaving the house.â€�

Today Pittman lives in a new one-bedroom apartment with central heat and a private bathroom. Her home is one of 20 units in a federally financed housing project that has opened a few doors from her old house, now condemned.

“Everything here is better than where I lived before,� said Pittman, who has spent most of her life working cotton fields and cleaning the homes of white landowners. Now she spends her time reading the Bible and listening to gospel music on the radio.

What has happened to Pittman and this tiny town on a remote bend of the Mississippi River between Vicksburg and Greenville is increasingly rare in this era of drastically reduced federal spending for housing.

Since 1980, the budget authority for subsidized housing financed through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has dropped from $27 billion to $8.4 billion--about 70%.

Construction Declines

Construction of subsidized housing has declined from 188,000 units in 1980 to this year’s authorized 20,000 units. During the same period, construction of subsidized housing for the elderly and the handicapped has decreased from 19,000 units to 11,000 units.

Mayersville, population 550, is among the smallest communities to share in the shrinking largess. Its $550,000 wood-and-brick apartment house, approved in 1984, was built on the persistence of its mayor, the support of a Washington-based organization for the aging and the approval of a key federal housing official.

“It took years to get this,� Mayor Unita Blackwell said, “years of trying to work through the system . . . to get to all the people you can to show them the need and twist their arm.�

Among the arm-twisters was Samuel J. Simmons, president of the National Caucus and Center for Black Aged (NCBA). “You see stories of the elderly getting fat and sassy and greedy,� Simmons said, “and then you see the depths of their poverty in Mayersville, in the heart of the old plantation country.�

Americans 65 and older have a median annual income of $19,117, and three-quarters own their homes; largely because of the equity in their homes, they have a median net worth of $55,000 to $67,000, depending on age group.

But the elderly in Mayersville, Simmons said, are “the ones at the bottom of the bottom, the ones who were left behind, because the younger generation has gone and no one wants to take Mama to Chicago anymore.�

County Seat

Once a major port of entry for slaves, Mayersville is the seat of Issaquena County, population 2,500, where a little more than half the population is black and most of the land is owned by a relatively small group of whites.

But Blackwell reckons that the town is about 80% black and that about three-quarters of its residents live below the federal poverty level--$5,572 a year for an individual and $11,203 for a family of four. More than one-third are over 60.

This is a town where families keep chickens in the yard and cook mustard greens fresh from their gardens to eat with corn bread, venison and “sock-it-to-me� cake made with sour cream and pecans. The main industry is town and county government, employing about 25 people.

“Five years ago, when I heard Unita talking about trying to get this project, it seemed like a pipe dream,� said W. E. Holcomb Jr., the white president of the five-member, white-majority county Board of Supervisors. “I had to be shown that it could be done.�

Blackwell, who has been mayor since the town was incorporated in 1976, said the project was accomplished by putting “one piece after another piece in position.� She worked with the five town aldermen, all of them black, to obtain the public and private grants that paid for the improvements.

“We had to set up the infrastructure first,� Blackwell said. “There wasn’t any public water, so we had to establish the Mayersville Utility Division. We did that in 1975. Then we had to get a sewage system, and to get that we had to incorporate. We had to have a fire truck. We had to have a street system.�

Blackwell, 54, learned her political skills as an activist in the national civil rights movement in the 1960s and later as a National Rural Fellow at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1982-83. John Mullen, one of Blackwell’s professors there, remembers her as a “unique woman . . . who came to us with little formal education but who had more street smarts than anybody I have ever seen.�

When it came time to obtain federal funding, Blackwell turned to the NCBA, which had helped develop several other housing projects for low-income elderly. As developer, the NCBA borrowed the money from HUD to finance construction in Mayersville; rent and rent subsidies help pay off the loan.

“We are always looking for little towns like Mayersville to help,� Simmons said. “We can’t build if there is no water and no sewage system in the town, but Unita got those for Mayersville and that made it possible for us to do this project.�

Driving Force

The approval of James Roland, HUD’s regional administrator in Jackson, Miss., also made it possible. Roland said he had long advocated housing in Mayersville, “because if it didn’t come from HUD, it wasn’t going to come.� But Blackwell, he said, was the driving force.

“Unita Blackwell has a way about her of getting things that can’t be gotten,� said Roland, who keeps a small bust of Robert E. Lee on his roll-top desk and wears a beard reminiscent of the Confederate general’s. “We were supposed to be enemies,� he said, “because I am a white Republican and she is a black Democrat, but the truth is that we got along very good.�

Blackwell, one of two daughters born to sharecropper parents, grew up in this delta country working as a $3-a-day field hand. Her parents, determined that she get a better education than the Mississippi public schools offered, sent her to live with relatives in Tennessee and Arkansas during the school year.

In 1964 Blackwell and seven other black residents of Mayersville attempted to register to vote at the county courthouse. Their application was denied. “That was a great turning point in my life,� said Blackwell, then 30 years old and the mother of a 3-year-old son. “I was a young woman with no outlook.�

She began fighting for black rights in the South. She led voter-registration drives. She participated in protests. After the 1965 march to Montgomery, Ala., she was riding in the car ahead of Viola Liuzzo, who was killed by a sniper’s bullet.

Later, she served on President Jimmy Carter’s Advisory Council on Women. She has made several trips to China as president of the U.S. China People’s Friendship Assn. But she has stayed here because “this is my home . . . because we had so much to do.�

“If I went to Chicago or New York or someplace,� Blackwell said, “I would have to try to fit in there, deal with poverty and problems. It wasn’t that I was going somewhere where richness was. So why not stay where I am?�

Mayersville is the largest community in Issaquena County, which takes its name from an Indian word meaning “deer river.� Following the meandering lines of the Mississippi River, the county is rich with hardwood forests and arable land. Its population has dwindled to about 2,500, about one-fourth its size at the turn of the century.

The town, 1.5 square miles, has three churches, two grocery stores and one branch bank. There are no paved streets. There are no schools, and children are bused to the next county.

A few of its estimated 120 homes are modest brick or frame houses with tidy yards. Many more, however, are rusty trailers and tin-roofed shacks, and Blackwell wants to tear some of them down.

But now, in the middle of town, is the new project named Unita Blackwell Estates.

“People would come out every day when it was being built,� Blackwell said. “It was a show to see. It was where you would bring your children, to see the bulldozers and the holes they made in the ground.�

Outlived 3 Wives

Tom Carter, 88, a lean man in overalls and a cap, was among the first to move into the project when it opened in December. A retired tractor driver who began working the cotton and corn fields here in 1910, he has outlived three wives and the “lady friend� who made the colorful quilt that he keeps on his bed.

Carter cannot read or write. To cash his $378 monthly Social Security check, he goes to the bank and marks an X on the back.

Each day, Carter spends about two hours sweeping the sidewalks that thread around the two apartment buildings and through the central courtyard. “I do it for the exercise and for the money,� said Carter, who earns a small fee to help keep the grounds clean.

Carter used to live in a nearby community in a drafty, tin-roofed house that “needed tearing down or setting afire . . . because it was rotten.�

Carter wallpapered the interior in a vain effort to eliminate the cold air seeping into the house--but the biggest problem was access.

After a fire late last year almost destroyed the wooden bridge connecting his old house and a nearby road, Carter patched a section of the bridge with a piece of tin and made himself a noisy, shaky passage to the rest of civilization.

Conditions were worse for Kit Holly, 80, a tractor driver with a monthly income of $326, and his wife, Mariah Banks, 57, a deer-camp cook. For the last six years, the couple lived in a rusty house trailer with no heat, no plumbing and a leaky roof.

“We were partly outdoors,� Banks said. “We would go to bed when it was raining, and we would wake up in the morning wet.� For warmth, they lit the butane oven and slept in the living room, which was closer to the kitchen than their bedroom. They bathed with stove-heated water in a tin tub.

Sitting on the couch in her tidy new apartment, Banks said she had no trouble learning to use the electric appliances. “The only thing that gets me kind of scared is my shower,� Banks said. “I am kind of halfway nervous, with that water all over my face and head. It feels funny.�