What closed in the Mississippi Delta, and who stayed

The easy version of this story is the shooting. On 10 October 2025 seven people were killed at Fourth and North Main in Leland, a town of 3,988, in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States last year, and the country had stopped talking about it inside a week.

The more useful version is the one the film keeps returning to without ever quite saying it out loud: hardly anybody in it wants to leave. A woman who has spent sixteen years caring for an elderly employer offers to drive the crew to her own town so they can see it properly. A man in Jonestown says plainly that he could go and does not want to. A former Marine came home to the town with the worst nickname in the Delta and now runs the group that cleans it. A dancer who has worked in Japan, Italy, India and South Korea came back to a town of 1,584 people.

So the numbers below are here to explain what these towns lost, not to explain away the people who stayed. The census counted these places in 1980 and again in 2020. The CDC records where people are killed. The FDIC records where the banks went. The USDA has kept a list, for thirty years, of the counties that never stopped being poor. None of that accounts for a specific night on a specific street. All of it describes the conditions the people in this film are choosing to live in anyway.

Jump to: Five towns · The people who stay · What the numbers say · What is left · What we are doing · Sources

Five towns, forty years apart

Start with the arithmetic that every other number here follows from. These are decennial census counts, not estimates: the town in 1980, the same town in 2020.

Friars Point

Coahoma County

1,400 in 1980  →  896 in 2020  down 36%

A river town that used to be a county seat and stopped being one by 1930, when the business of Coahoma County moved to Clarksdale for good. When Time went there in 2013 it counted what was left: an elementary school, a few churches, a city hall, a post office and a small general store. No doctor and no clinic, no drugstore, no library, no sit down restaurant, and in the magazine's words no businesses to speak of. The crew drove in expecting an old southern town and filmed empty buildings on a street with antebellum houses still standing on it. What is open is a filling station and store that a family has run since 1995, where the man behind the counter is a sharecropper's son who moved to California and came back, and where he says his father was shot inside it and that no amount of paint covers where the blood is.

Jonestown

Coahoma County

1,231 in 1980  →  962 in 2020  down 22%
Peak 1,701 in 2000, so down 43% from its peak

The men outside the shop say the mill was the backbone of the town and that one of them gave it thirty years. Delta Oil Mill had crushed cottonseed in Jonestown since 1942. In October 2014 its president said out loud what the acreage already implied, that there was not enough cottonseed left to justify running two plants: Coahoma County had planted 140,000 acres of cotton in 2006 and was down to 50,000 or 60,000, with the rest of the land turned over to rice, soybeans, corn and peanuts. The company went through bankruptcy and the plant closed. It is the one thing here that came back. The site reopened as Cottonseed Co-op, incorporated in 2015, and when its workers unionised in June 2020 there were 57 of them. A town of 962 people got its factory back at the size a town of 962 people gets.

Mound Bayou

Bolivar County

2,917 in 1980  →  1,534 in 2020  down 47%

Founded on 12 July 1887 by Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, who bought swampland and built a town that freed slaves and their children would own and govern themselves. It incorporated in 1898. This is the place the crew set out to find, and the thing worth knowing about its decline is when it happened: the census counted more people in Mound Bayou in 1980 than in any year before it. The town's high water mark is inside living memory, and 47% of it has left since. It was still 96.8% Black at the 2020 census.

Rosedale

Bolivar County

2,793 in 1980  →  1,584 in 2020  down 43%

The town the film keeps coming back to, and the one with a nickname it does not want. In 2010 Rosedale had the twenty second lowest median household income of any place in the United States with more than a thousand residents. What the camera finds on the main street is a row of clubs, a blue building that one of them thinks is going to be a hookah lounge, and men who answer the question about daily life with a joke about getting shot and then, a beat later, with "good living, it's cool, it's laid back." Both answers are the town. The person the piece ends on is a former Marine who came home, mentors kids and organises the group picking up litter in it.

Leland

Washington County

6,667 in 1980  →  3,988 in 2020  down 40%

On the night of 10 October 2025 a homecoming crowd was on North Main Street at Fourth. Seven people were killed and nineteen were injured, twelve of them by gunfire. It was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in 2025. Nine people were arrested, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation led the case with the FBI, which set up a tip line for phone footage and put up a $5,000 reward. The town has 3,988 residents. The film's point about it is not the arithmetic of the night but how quickly the country stopped talking about it, and that part is hard to argue with.

The people who stay

Ask what daily life is like in Rosedale and the first answer is a joke about getting shot. The second answer, a beat later from the same men, is "good living life, it's cool, it's a laid back, small town." Both are true at once, and only one of them ever leaves the county. The town's nickname is the RIP. The men who explained what it stands for also said they refuse to use it: "we don't like to uphold that name. This is our city. It's a place of love."

In Jonestown two men outside the shop run through what the town has lost, the mill and the four banks and the restaurants, and then land somewhere else entirely: "it's a good place. It's a good place. That's all we got. That's all I love. All I love. But I can leave. I don't want to leave." What they offer a stranger who turns up with a camera is this: "you come here with open arms, we treat you like our brother."

In the town the crew were driven to, a woman who was born and raised there and has spent sixteen years caring for an elderly employer sums up four decades in a sentence: "I learned to live with it and deal with it. I won't change it for nothing." Then: "we're mostly family here. Everybody."

At the filling station, the sharecropper's son who moved to California and came back is not sentimental about either place. He loved Los Angeles enough to change his name over it. He still says this: "if you don't come to Mississippi, you won't know what the South is about." And he says the thing that is easy to miss, which is that leaving and returning is now a route rather than a defeat: "a lot of people can go to California and come back with new ideas."

Then there is the man the film ends on. He left for the Marine Corps, joined a dance team while stationed in Japan, became a pioneer of a dance style, worked in Italy, India and South Korea, built an audience of 32,000, and came home to Rosedale. He mentors kids, picks up litter with whoever turns up, and describes the job in the plainest possible terms: "be a product of our community, be proactive instead of reactive." His theory of how a place changes has no policy in it at all: "each one teach one, then it's going to catch on like a fire."

That is the Delta the numbers cannot reach. The people in this film are not stuck there in the way the phrase usually means. Many of them have seen elsewhere, some of them have lived elsewhere, and they came back to a county with a third of its people gone and no bank in town, because it is theirs.

What the numbers say

Poverty is not a bad year here, it is the baseline

The USDA keeps a category called persistent poverty: a county whose poverty rate has sat at or above 20% at four measurements taken roughly ten years apart, which is to say for about three decades without a break. In the 2025 edition of its county typology, 318 counties in the United States qualify, around one in ten. Forty four of them are in Mississippi, out of eighty two counties in the state.

American Community Survey 2024 five year estimates. A household in Coahoma County takes home less than half of the national median, and better than one person in three is below the poverty line.

The violence is rural, and it is measured

The film's framing is that the country only talks about Memphis and Jackson. The data agrees with it. Analysis of CDC mortality records by the Center for American Progress puts the highest gun homicide rates in the country not in the big cities but in rural counties, and over 2021 to 2024 eight of the twenty highest rates in the United States were Mississippi counties, five of them in the top ten. Holmes County had the highest per capita firearm homicide rate of any county in the nation in 2024.

Washington County, where Leland is, sits second in the country, behind only St. Louis. Bolivar County, which holds Rosedale and Mound Bayou, is not in the top twenty.

In the film the man from Rosedale lists the response: Cleveland on a curfew, Greenville on a curfew. Both are real. Greenville's council imposed a citywide 9pm to 6am curfew in 2025 after a college footballer from the town was shot dead, with nightclubs ordered shut by midnight, and Cleveland requires late night businesses in its commercial districts to close from midnight until 5am. None of that is why the towns emptied out: the population figures above were most of the way down before any of this, and the mill and the banks went first. Violence is what happens to a place that has already lost its work, and almost everyone in the film says the same thing about it, that it is the young and it is the guns and it was not like this before.

The banks left, and that is measurable too

In Jonestown the men outside the shop say they used to have four banks and now have none. We cannot verify the four. We can verify the pattern it belongs to: the National Community Reinvestment Coalition counted 6,008 places in the United States where banks closed branches between 2008 and 2016, and in the Federal Reserve's sixth district, which includes Mississippi, 46% of rural counties lost branches between 2012 and 2017 against 41% of rural counties nationally. When Regions Bank decided several Delta branches no longer made sense, four of them were handed to Hope Credit Union in 2015. Itta Bena, forty miles from Leland, ended up with no bank at all.

A rural census tract counts as a banking desert when there is no branch within ten miles. That distance is not an inconvenience, it is a credit condition: the further a small business sits from a lender, the less likely the lending is to happen.

And the cotton went first

The film says sharecropping ended in the 1960s. It declined with mechanisation from the 1940s on, and the acreage tells the story better than a decade does. Coahoma County planted 140,000 acres of cotton in 2006. Within a few years it was down to 50,000 or 60,000, the land switched to rice, soybeans, corn and peanuts, and in October 2014 the president of Delta Oil Mill said there was no longer enough cottonseed in the region to justify running both of his plants. The mill in Jonestown had been crushing seed since 1942. That is the sequence in one county: the crop changes, the mill that existed to process the crop closes, and the town that existed to staff the mill has 962 people left in it.

What is still open is somebody's hustle

Watch the film for what people are actually doing for money and the same shape keeps turning up. A filling station in Friars Point that a family has run since 1995, selling pig feet, pork salad and Stage Planks, the iced molasses cookies sold in the South since before 1901 and which the auto captions turn into "state planes". A dancer with an international career and an audience of 32,000, home and working. A man who spent thirty years at the mill and is still the person who knows how the town works. And two men naming, unprompted, the business their town is missing: "we ain't got no restaurants. If we had some stoves or something to go to, this place be greater than what it is."

That last line is the whole thing. It is not a complaint about the government or a wish for a factory to come back. It is a man saying his town would be better if somebody cooked, and the reason nobody has is not that nobody there can cook.

What left these towns was the premises. The mill, the four banks, the sit down restaurant, the drugstore, the businesses Time went looking for in Friars Point and could not find. What is still standing is people trading without any of it: out of a kitchen, out of a truck, out of a phone, out of a station that has been in one family for thirty years. That is not a consolation prize. It is how most commerce in America started and it is how a place with no landlord, no bank branch and no card machine still has an economy.

It is also, exactly, who this company is for. Nilfpay exists because somebody who makes something good should not need a shopfront, a card terminal or a bank in town to sell it. The people in this film already do the hard part, which is being the kind of person who stays and builds something anyway. The part we can take off them is smaller and duller: a page that takes the order, states the price and gets them paid before they cook.

The deadliest shooting of 2025 happened in a town of 4,000 people and you probably did not hear about it.

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