In 1966, a retired high school principal named George Thompson Pound reached for his Rand McNally atlas. He turned to page six, took a pen, and drew off Appalachia. Starting in West Virginia, he marked along the Blue Ridge Mountains, through the Carolinas, northwest Georgia, and east Alabama.
But Pound kept going. He marked past the clear end of mountainous terrain around Birmingham, Alabama, and passed into North Mississippi—his home. With the stroke of a pen, Pound boldly reimagined geography and race in one of America’s most notorious Jim Crow states. He fused the imaginative work of region-making and mapmaking into a lasting political reality for the land and its people.
Pound made his map for Mississippi’s governor and congressional delegation. These political elites, segregationists like US senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis, hoped the federal government would include northeast Mississippi in its new Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), a Great Society program that eventually distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments.
This movement to invent what segregationists called “Appalachian Mississippi” countered the War on Poverty’s economic empowerment of rural Black communities. Since 1964, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) had poured federal funding directly into Mississippi’s Black freedom struggle through institutions for public housing, cooperative agriculture, and childcare, such as Project Head Start. The ARC model bypassed the OEO’s mandate for the “maximum feasible participation” of local beneficiaries in the use of poverty funds. Ruling whites had resisted the War on Poverty’s direct redistribution from the beginning, but their reimagining of southern Appalachia was a watershed. The ARC promised continued white control of federal monies and further undermined the OEO’s unmediated funding of Black communities. It imagined, in short, a path around democracy.
There was just one problem: Mississippi lacked mountains. It was right there on Pound’s map. Mississippi sat in the coastal plain, the same shade of gray as West Tennessee or East Texas. Undeterred, an unknown conspirator merely took a fine-point pen and changed the map. They drew ridges and valleys where there were none. They blended the mountains of Alabama and Tennessee into the Cotton Belt. At arm’s length, this new map showed Mississippi as the western terminus of the Appalachian chain. And when Pound and southern Democrats made their case before Congress in 1967, they submitted this map as evidence. This was the forgery that made Appalachian Mississippi.