Sugar Ditch was a Black neighborhood in Tunica, Mississippi, where residents lived in scrap-wood shacks along an open sewage ditch until national outrage in 1985 forced local officials to install plumbing and relocate families into mobile homes. The name came from the shallow stream running behind the alley, which collected human waste from the surrounding homes because the shacks had no indoor plumbing and residents used five-gallon buckets as toilets. The story became one of the defining images of American rural poverty in the 1980s and set the stage for everything that has happened in Tunica County since.
What Sugar Ditch Looked Like
The alley ran two or more blocks behind Tunica’s main street, about 30 miles south of Memphis. The ditch itself functioned as an open sewer, and federal health officials linked it to roughly 50 diseases caused by contact with human waste.1The New Yorker. Comment Homes were cobbled together from charred planks, broken boards, and scrap. Bedsheets often stood in for doors and windows. Residents shared outdoor faucets and paid about $15 a month in rent for shacks with no electricity and no indoor plumbing.
The neighborhood had been inside Tunica’s city limits since 1927 but did not receive a sewer line until 1975, and even then the shacks were not connected to it.1The New Yorker. Comment The population was entirely Black. Hundreds of thousands of federal grant dollars had gone into renovating the town square a few blocks away while Sugar Ditch remained, as one report put it, “forgotten.”2WREG News. Sugar Ditch, Decades Later The Reagan administration’s Civil Rights Division within the Treasury Department’s Office of Revenue Sharing identified discriminatory practices in how water and sewer services had been provided to the area.
The County Behind the Alley
Sugar Ditch was the visible edge of a much larger pattern. Tunica County had been shaped by cotton, tenant farming, and mechanization that pushed labor out without bringing any replacement industry in. As of 1930, 86 percent of residents were African American, and tenant farmers operated 94 percent of the county’s farms. By the 1960s, Tunica had the highest share of Mississippians with fewer than five years of education and the lowest share of high school graduates.3Mississippi Encyclopedia. Tunica County
By the mid-1980s, the county had the highest percentage of residents living below the poverty line in the United States and the lowest median household income, along with the eighth-highest infant mortality rate and the fourth-highest percentage of births to teenage mothers.4The Atlantic. Mississippi The poverty rate was 56 percent.5The Washington Post. An Opportunity Gamed Away In 1984, 70 percent of adults over 25 lacked a high school diploma and nearly a quarter of homes lacked modern plumbing. The county was 74 percent Black, but virtually all of its more than 30 millionaires were white landowners. As one account put it, “To be poor in Tunica County is to be black.”
How Sugar Ditch Became National News
In 1985, CBS correspondent Morley Safer traveled to Tunica for a 60 Minutes segment on the Black community around Sugar Ditch, then also known as Kestevan Alley. Safer compared the conditions to South African townships, calling what he found “apartheid without passed laws or barbed wire,” and said that “it is as if there was no Little Rock, there was no Selma.”5The Washington Post. An Opportunity Gamed Away
That same summer, the Reverend Jesse Jackson toured Sugar Ditch with Representatives Augustus Hawkins of California and Charles Hayes of Illinois.6The Washington Post. Somewhere Between the Peabody Ducks and Ethiopia Jackson labeled the community “America’s Ethiopia,” a phrase that stuck.7UPI. Mississippi Delta’s Tunica County Is America’s Poorest Between the broadcast and the visit, the pressure was enough to move officials who had watched the same conditions for decades.
What Changed After 1985
Landlords were ordered to connect their properties to Tunica’s municipal sewer lines and provide indoor plumbing.2WREG News. Sugar Ditch, Decades Later State and federal officials arranged to move families out of the shacks and into mobile homes. The first five trailers arrived near Tunica on December 23, 1985, and families began moving in on January 9, 1986. Seventeen trailers were initially allocated, with the state’s Governor’s Office of Federal-State Programs authorizing roughly $2,000 in utility deposits per unit, and most residents, who were unemployed, were designated to receive federal rent assistance.8The New York Times. Mississippi Families Start Moving Out of Shacks
The open ditch itself was eventually filled with concrete. By 2012, a senior housing development stood where the shacks had been, and a fence surrounded parts of the former ditch. Progress outside the immediate alley moved more slowly. Community activist Joe Hawkins said that as of 2012 some residents in the surrounding area still lacked proper sewage service. “We are just getting to the point where we have infrastructure out in some of the areas where you can have at least running water coming to the home,” he said.2WREG News. Sugar Ditch, Decades Later
The Casino Boom That Was Supposed to Fix It
In 1990, Mississippi legalized casino gambling along the Gulf Coast and major waterways, including the Mississippi River. Tunica’s first casino, Splash, opened in 1992, and a string of others followed through the mid-1990s. Total jobs in the county rose from about 2,000 in 1992 to roughly 17,000 in 2005. Average annual income for a Tunica resident rose from $12,700 in the early 1990s to $26,000 in 2004. The county budget grew from $2.8 million to $28 million by 1995, and property taxes were cut by 25 percent in 1997.9Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Tunica, Miss., Lays Big Bet on the Casino Industry
Between 1993 and 2015, Tunica County collected $759 million in casino-related revenue. About 2.5 percent of that total went to social programs for the poor. Leadership put the money into roads, tourism infrastructure, and property tax cuts rather than job training or direct services. Because 76 percent of property tax dollars came from just 100 entities, the tax cuts flowed largely to wealthy landowners.5The Washington Post. An Opportunity Gamed Away
Inside the casinos themselves, a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report found that Black workers accounted for 71.2 percent of casino laborers but only 24.6 percent of officials and managers. Casino development also pushed property values and rents up, which made affordable housing harder to find rather than easier.10U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Mississippi Delta Report
Where Tunica Stands Now
The boom did not last. Competition from neighboring states and the spread of legal gambling eroded Tunica’s market. Harrah’s Tunica closed in 2014, eliminating 1,300 jobs.5The Washington Post. An Opportunity Gamed Away In 2025, Sam’s Town Casino, the largest remaining property, announced its permanent closure after 31 years, cutting another 175 to 200 jobs. Webster Franklin, head of the Tunica Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the area had “lost some market share” and that “things didn’t come all the way back,” and that he did not foresee any new casinos entering the market.11WREG News. Sam’s Town Casino Closure in Tunica Cuts Hundreds of Jobs Only five casinos remain in Tunica as the state’s gaming industry shifts toward the Gulf Coast.12Mississippi Today. Mississippi Marketplace Tunica Casino Business News
The poverty rate fell from 56 percent before the casinos to around 30 percent by 2015, still twice the national average.5The Washington Post. An Opportunity Gamed Away It has stayed in that range: 31.7 percent in 2020, 33.8 percent in 2023, and 31.1 percent in 2024.13Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Poverty Status, Tunica County, MS Unemployment, once over 15 percent, was 3.7 percent in 2023 and 5.2 percent in 2025.14Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Unemployment Rate, Tunica County, MS The public schools were 97 percent Black as of 2015, with a 57 percent graduation rate and a “D” rating from the state, while a mostly white private academy continued to operate alongside them. Life expectancy in the county was 67 years for men and 73 for women.
Joe Hawkins, who went on to serve as the county road manager, put the arithmetic plainly: “Would you think a county that got almost a billion dollars from the casinos, a county of just 10,000 people, would look like this?”15Los Angeles Times. Tunica Casino The ditch has been filled. The shacks are gone. The pattern that produced them, deep poverty and public investment that skips the people who need it most, has been harder to bury.