Nearly every member of my family has ties to Mississippi. During school breaks, we would load up the Aerostar and head out from Detroit, down I-75 south to our grandparents' home in Cruger, a small town nestled somewhere between where Emmett Till's body was found and where Medgar Evers was assassinated. As a child, I didn't like staying too long because there was never anything to do. As an adult, I wish I would have treasured those days a lot more.
As one would imagine in a town with fewer than 500 people, good-paying jobs in Cruger are not plentiful. The current median household income is less than $25,000, leaving roughly 35% of the population living in poverty. There are a lot of towns like Cruger in Mississippi, our nation's poorest state.
Crawford, where Hall of Famer Jerry Rice grew up, has a 26% poverty rate. Archie Manning's birthplace of Drew has a poverty rate of more than 40%. Rams great Jackie Slater was born in the state capital of Jackson, where 180,000 residents recently went weeks without clean drinking water and where 1 in 4 live in poverty.
