The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry: A People's History

By Deanne Love Stephens

The seafood industry on the coast of Mississippi has attracted waves of immigrants and other workers—oftentimes folks who were either already acquainted with maritime livelihoods or those who quickly adapted to the resources of the region. For generations the industry has provided employment and sustenance to Coast peoples. Deanne Love Stephens tells their stories and identifies key populations who have worked this harvest. Oyster and shrimp processing were the most significant of these trades, and much of the Gulf Coast's history follows these two delicacies. Harvesting, processing, and marketing oyster and shrimp products built the Mississippi seafood industry and powered the growth of the entire coastal region.

This book is the first to offer a broad view of the many ethnic groups and distinct populations who toiled in the oyster and shrimp industries. Relying heavily upon contemporary newspapers, oral histories, and interviews to create a rich picture of the industry and its workers, the author presents the history of laboring people who daily toiled in factories and often went unheard and unrecognized.

Stephens provides an overview of significant early developments and the beginnings of the industry, considering the development of railroad expansion, lighthouse construction, and ice technology. She covers significant state and federal legislation that both defined and protected marine resources, illustrating the depth of the industry’s importance as Mississippians wrestled with adequate protective measures to preserve oyster and shrimp resources throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781496833563

Deanne Love Stephens

Deanne Love Stephens is professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is author of Plague Among the Magnolias: The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Maud Daly was five years old when she picked shrimp for the Peerless Oyster Company in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Her younger sister, Gracie, was only three and worked by her side. In the picture Lewis Hine snapped in 1911 as part of his ongoing series spotlighting child labor, both children appear tired and forlorn. Maud’s dress is filthy, and Gracie, too, looks unkempt. In her right hand, Maud clutches her shrimp cup, a large metal container punctured with drainage holes that held approximately one gallon of peeled shrimp. With her left arm, she protectively encircles her younger sister who is tiredly leaning against her. Had these little girls just finished a twelve-hour shift? When was their last meal? How much sleep had these little girls had over the last many hours? Thousands of workers, both young and old, male and female, endured the difficult life that these two children typify as seafood factory workers. With their hard work and long hours, they built the Mississippi Gulf Coast shrimp and oyster industry with every cup of picked shrimp and can of shucked oysters. What life was like in often-deplorable conditions and how these workers facilitated the growth of a thriving seafood business is a public history often grounded in oral histories that embodies an exceptionable aspect of industrial development in lower Mississippi. While the growth of the seafood industry along coastal Mississippi and the experiences of its workforce coincide with the rise of similar businesses and mirror labor environments across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood industry was unique.

To relate the history of Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood workers, this study first provides a historical overview of significant early developments along the Mississippi Coast and the initial growth of the seafood industry. In the first two chapters, the framework to understand initial technological changes that shaped the expansion of the Gulf Coast seafood industry outlines the development of railroad expansion, lighthouse construction, and ice technology. Additionally, a review of significant state and federal legislation that both defined and protected marine resources illustrates the depth of the seafood industry’s importance as Mississippians wrestled with adequate protective measures to preserve oyster and shrimp resources early in the nineteenth century. The remaining chapters examine the people who worked in and who owned seafood-processing factories. This is a story of people’s struggles, the history of laboring people who daily toiled in factories and often went unheard and unrecognized, their voices lost to time.

The workers in the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood industry were and are for the most part immigrants, either from foreign countries like Croatia or Mexico or from other states, such as Maryland, Louisiana, and Alabama. Different enterprises in the state did not experience this immigrant influx with its continuous cultural and economic blend that developed the seafood industry of today. Each group of laborers mixed its culture or working methods into an amalgamation that is today’s seafood industry. From its inception when Polish workers from Baltimore shucked oysters to today when modern processors hire Central American laborers to sort shrimp, the efforts and skills of immigrant workers have primarily built and maintained the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood industry. This is the significance of this industry’s history in the larger contexts of Gulf Coast regional, southern, and United States history. Few places in the early twentieth century had as much influence in one industry where so many different ethnic groups created the workforce throughout decades of development. Within this period, immigrants often became prosperous, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century, while local fishers often struggled. With a powerful work ethic, many immigrants became driving forces in the seafood industry. The interwoven stories of these workers are the ties that bind the history of the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood industry.

Oral histories provide a pathway of understanding that transcends academic discourse. I relied heavily on the participants in the seafood industry to tell their own stories. While oral history is an accepted, traditional source of historical inquiry, personal memories can deteriorate with time and oftentimes blur with age. Temporal distance from an event can cloud exactness. Therefore, I have included additional primary and secondary source material throughout this study to provide much-needed context for this complex story. Nevertheless, historian Michael Frisch explains that oral histories continue both to inform and to challenge, compellingly, the practice of history today, especially on the unstable border between academic and public discourse.¹ The words of the Coast seafood workers best relate the nuances and challenges of the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood industry. Robert C. Williams attests, Oral interviews are a significant historical source.² As a result, this study reveals experiences heretofore untold.

Creating a study based extensively on oral histories is not unique. Beginning in the 1970s, oral history became a tool by which to understand in new dimensions historical events and the characters involved. Since then, many examples have followed.³ For instance, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and others constructed their groundbreaking work, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, to recreate the lives of hardworking people eking out an existence in the mill industry. Like the seafood workers along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, millworkers in both North and South Carolina as well as Georgia rose to the piercing sound of the steam whistle … as the herald of the new day. In summer, winter, spring, and fall, in hot weather or in cold the workers in the mills and the seafood business began their day of toil with the call of the factory whistle.⁴ Similarities between the two groups of laborers are striking as they struggled with substandard working conditions and economic, social, and political places on the periphery of society.

Historians have used oral histories for decades to relate the experiences of common laborers. In this work, however, for the first time in a collective voice, the recollections of seafood workers along the Mississippi Gulf Coast tell a cohesive story of work and life based on the shrimp and oyster business.⁵ While some of these records are parts of already categorized and accessible collections, most of them used in this work are unpublished and in private family histories. In total, the historical realities of these narratives paint a picture of disempowered seafood workers persevering under extreme hardships.

Many laborers across Mississippi simultaneously endured difficult economic times as the seafood industry developed along the Gulf Coast. Jacqueline Dowd Hall asserts that most studies of the South that focus between 1880 and the 1930s have emphasized poverty and suffering.⁶ The scope of this work, however, goes beyond the mid-twentieth century and ventures into the early twenty-first century. The socioeconomic dynamics of the state shifted dramatically throughout that timeframe, but seafood workers along the Mississippi Gulf Coast continued to persevere regardless of new challenges.

As Mississippi was a rural state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the seafood industry commenced, many other citizens living across the state labored as either farmworkers or sharecroppers in the rich black soil of the Mississippi Delta and the fertile Jackson Prairie region. Cotton was the foundation of this agricultural base across the state wherever it grew profitably. By 1909, according to Charles S. Aiken, cotton production was near its apex in the South and by 1940, more of the Mississippi alluvial valley’s land [Delta] was in plantations than that of any other part of the South.⁷ Sharecroppers farmed the land.

Colton Map of Mississippi, 1886. Image courtesy of David Price.

According to Arthur F. Raper and Ira De Augustine Reid, the term sharecropper described an individual who earned low wages and experienced job insecurity. Croppers also had a lack of opportunity for self-direction and responsible participation in community affairs.⁸ Housing for the sharecroppers and their families was normally substandard with flies everywhere and screens nowhere as the laborers scratched out a hardscrabble living tilling land that belonged to someone else. This description of the lack of possibility and inadequate material goods is applicable to textile workers, sharecroppers, and seafood workers. Whether they milled cotton, plowed fields, or shucked oysters, those who worked in these jobs suffered extreme deprivations. Mississippi seafood workers, however, were different in one significant way. Many who worked in that particular industry included immigrants who came as laborers. While localized workers across the South shared poverty and its multitude of ills, along the Mississippi Gulf Coast waves of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries labored in the seafood industry, often seeking economic opportunities or political asylum. These immigrant workers created a unique culture and built an industry unlike any other in Mississippi.

The water environment that defines coastal Mississippi has always attracted people, from early Native Americans like the Biloxi and Choctaw to European colonists in the 1700s; people have gravitated over centuries to the Mississippi Coast. They came mostly because of its easy access to marine resources. Historian Charles Sullivan differentiates the region by referring to the southernmost counties of the state as the panhandle of Mississippi.⁹ Historically, however, the definition of the coastal region includes the three lower counties of the state that are contiguous to the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico—Hancock (1812), Harrison (1842), and Jackson Counties (1812). The Mississippi Coast drops approximately twelve miles south of present-day Interstate 10, the transcontinental highway that connects the East Coast to the West Coast and delineates the boundary of the Third Coast—the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico.

Mississippians have continuously viewed the Coast as a place of difference from the remainder of the state. Its physical and cultural environment was not typical of Mississippi nor were many of the economic pursuits of its citizens similar to others living north of the Coast. No large-scale agricultural operations defined it as a geographic region. Instead, small fishing villages with boatyards, fishmongers, and seafood operations along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico have traditionally characterized the Coast. Today, vacation and tourist amenities and the casino industry are also recognized ingredients of coastal culture.

In 1908, a contemporary newspaper headlined that the Coast Does Not Look Like Other Sections of [the] State. In this article subtitled Oyster Committee Finds Much to Wonder at on Gulf Coast, a member of this organization announced, This was my first trip to the coast and I was surprised at much that I saw. It does not look like any other section of the state and it is hard to realize that you are still in Mississippi.¹⁰ The allure of the Coast remains strong, and people still characterize this Third Coast in Mississippi as radically different from the reminder of the state (culturally, socially, and economically) because of the multitude of unique characteristics. The Coast was a place that offered a wide variety of differences, including some like gambling that were unacceptable in other parts of the state. The seafood industry, however, significantly spotlights the economic distinction between northern Mississippi and the coastal region. Within this narrow sliver of land between the Mississippi Sound and Interstate 10, it birthed and developed a distinctive culture and economy for Mississippi.

Throughout its years of growth, the Mississippi Coast seafood industry attracted many waves of immigrants and other workers—oftentimes people who were already acquainted either with maritime livelihoods or those who quickly adapted to opportunities provided by the resources of the region. Immigrants continue to arrive on the Coast as different populations search for stability and opportunity. Regardless of where they settled along the Mississippi Coast and when they arrived, newcomers have been able to rely on the resources of the Gulf of Mexico in one way or another. The seafood industry, especially, and its accompanying trades have for generations provided employment or sustenance to people of the Coast.

This study examines two major aspects of the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood industry and identifies key populations that have worked in the seafood-related occupations. Oyster and shrimp processing were the most significant of these trades; much of the history of the Gulf Coast rests upon these two industries. Their harvesting, processing, and marketing initially built the Mississippi seafood industry and concomitantly contributed to the growth of the entire coastal region. Therefore, the oyster and shrimp industries are most closely analyzed in this study.

While other historians, anthropologists, and academics have explored some of the immigrant ethnicities who have made the Mississippi Gulf Coast their home, no scholarly or popular book has yet offered a broad view of the ethnicities and races who toiled in the oyster and shrimp industries. Barbara Carpenter solicited articles for an edited volume, Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi, in 1992 in which a few of the earliest coastal cultures, such as Native Americans, appeared. Later, she and Shana Walton coedited Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century, which included many ethnic groups that they weave into the rich fabric of Mississippi culture (the Chinese, Lebanese, Jewish, Filipino, and Vietnamese, for example). This compilation provides a view of immigrants who have made Mississippi their home, but only Aimee L. Schmidt’s contribution—Down Around Biloxi: An Overview of Ethnic and Occupational Identity in a Coastal Town—looks exclusively at people in the Coast seafood industry. Since that publication in 2012, however, wide varieties of people from Hispanic cultures have settled in Biloxi and along the greater Gulf Coast. Moreover, Schmidt did not address local citizens who worked in the seafood trades before and throughout the various waves of immigrants. Thus, the more inclusive overview provided in this work will broaden understanding and appreciation of the roles of racial and ethnic identity in the Gulf Coast seafood industry.

Some works have examined the Biloxi seafood industry itself but none has included coastal-wide communities largely in regard to the history of the seafood workers. The Seafood Capital of the World: Biloxi’s Maritime History by Edmond Boudreaux and Biloxi 300 Years by Val Husley, for example, are primarily concerned with Slavonian and Cajun seafood workers and do not examine other labor forces to any great degree. This work maps various operations along the entire Mississippi Gulf Coast and more inclusively surveys the many ethnic and racial groups, such as those refugees from Vietnam who fled their homeland in the 1970s and 1980s, who have worked in the Mississippi Coast seafood industry resulting in a broader perspective of the total seafood trade and its workers. With a dearth of secondary sources that explore the experiences of Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood workers comprehensively, this study relies upon contemporary newspapers, publicly available oral histories, and private family history collections to create a richer picture of the industry and its workers than previously presented. Oral histories provide valuable firsthand accounts of the laborers as they relate their trials and tribulations in the seafood businesses. These histories are vital in defining the hardships endured by the workers and in grasping the perseverance exhibited by thousands of workers who toiled in often-grueling conditions. While oral histories are good sources for this kind of history, other sources, such as newspapers and ethnic studies, are important as well. Contemporary newspapers offer a lens through which readers can view how earlier societies regarded the seafood workers and how they assimilated into localities. Many times immigrants were targets of mockery and sometimes found themselves singled out in contemptuous ways. Newspapers throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries supply a focused picture of societal prejudices and behaviors regarding immigrants and race.

Other significant sources in completing this study were interviews with individuals who are the keepers of their family histories. Many people on the Coast have maintained significant family history collections that they willingly shared. The seafood business is often a study of individual initiative and entrepreneurship that some coastal families have been able to preserve through pictures, family stories, and even amateur oral history recordings. While not in a public collection, these resources were fundamental to this study.

Eight Flags Display formerly located in Gulfport, Mississippi. Image courtesy of Paul Jermyn.

The Mississippi coastal experience in the seafood business is significant as it defined a unique niche in the economy of Mississippi and simultaneously provided opportunities for cultural identification. However, the growth of the seafood industry did not occur in a vacuum. Simultaneously, seafood commerce across the United States witnessed the same type of development based on the backbreaking labor of its workers. Therefore, the story of Mississippi seafood workers is a slice of a broader saga of seafood laborers who could have picked crabs in Maryland, packed sardines in Maine, or possibly peeled shrimp in Alabama. Investigating the various peoples who have contributed to and continue to define the Mississippi Gulf Coast seafood story reveals a tale of hard work, ingenuity, and cultural preservation that retells an uninterrupted story of adaptation and success repeated in seafood areas around the United States. Undoubtedly, there are many more stories to uncover.

The extensive cultural blend of the various ethnicities and races that have made and continue to make the Mississippi Gulf Coast their home include among others French, African