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Abstract
This thesis examines the efforts of local planters, economic elites, government officials, and agricultural scientists in remaking the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta in the aftermath of WWII. Spurred to action by increased labor costs caused by the mass-outmigration of black farmworkers, local reformers worked through a regional development organization called the Delta Council to pursue a shift from labor-intensive to mechanized capital-intensive cotton production in the region. On one hand, they sought to improve production methods through the integration of cutting-edge science and technology. On the other, they pursued initiatives to engineer the region’s black workforce to better suit a new emerging economy. These reformers aimed to perpetuate the region’s Jim Crow status-quo beyond the economic relations underpinning it and against the rising expectations of the region’s black residents. Although Delta reformers promised that mechanization would create shared prosperity, prosperity only materialized for the region’s ruling elite.