Sunflower County

Monday, Alo Athletic Apparel announced plans to invest 176 million to locate a new distribution center in Southaven, creating more than 400 jobs.

Tuesday, startup plastic manufacturer Koinonia announced an investment of 7.7 million to establish operations in Sunflower County.

PJ Waldrop, the new executive director of the MDA, says a lot of industries are looking for room to grow.

There are a lot of companies that are looking for locations where they are telling you on the front end, "Uh, but we also need some room to expand."

[upbeat music] A startup plastics manufacturer is investing $7.7 million to establish operations in Drew.

Koinonia plans to rehabilitate an existing facility in Sunflower County, installing new equipment and preparing approximately 150,000 square feet of surrounding concrete surface to accommodate future growth.

PJ Waldrop, the new executive director of the MDA, says a lot of industries are looking for room to grow.

There are a lot of companies that are looking for locations where they are telling you on the front end, "Uh, but we also need some room to expand."

So that's from early on.

In addition to that, she understood grueling poverty and even that her county, Sunflower County in Mississippi, was basically the poorest county in the poorest state in the United States.

And so she early on also understood that not being able to own your own land, being in perpetual debt through the sharecropping system meant that people had no control over their lives, had no control over-- didn't even have enough money to feed themselves and their families.

Um, and so she had this understanding of being in debt peonage, not owning land, not having any control over what's, um, what's grown, where it goes, that kind of thing, meant that people, especially Black folks who were already, you know, socially and politically, uh, discriminated against, were also in an economic bind.

She built a set, uh, uh, forget how many hundreds of affordable housing.

Uh, she, uh, helped negotiate, uh, HF- uh, FHA home loans so that, um, members could afford the housing.

They were built, uh, oh, 73 homes, all with indoor plumbing and electricity, which was not the regular, uh, uh, for homes, for Black homes in Sunflower County in the '70s.

This is early '70s.

So broad daylight.

So, yeah, my first Bigfoot sighting, that was broad daylight in a wildlife management area in Sunflower County.

So you said that you see these tree structures.

You stop your vehicle.