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Casino ushers in major changes for Mississippi town
It is Sunday in the deepest part of the Deep South, and the roads flanked with Queen Anne’s lace and purple-blooming thistle and ubiquitous kudzu all lead to church. The church might be a doublewide with a trio of creosoted crosses planted in red clay beds of monkey grass, or a Butler building, or a brick Baptist sanctuary with stained-glass windows placed in memory of somebody’s mama.
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But they are all churches, where people pray for rain, for good health, for each other.
This is Bible country, land of AM radio preachers, the state where 20 years ago it was against the law to buy or sell a carton of milk or a pair of pantyhose in the capital city on a Sunday.

And yet on this sun-drenched Sunday way down in Mississippi, the two-lane rural roads to Philadelphia and the nearby Choctaw Indian reservation also lead to a casino. Inside, cheek to cheek over the craps table, elbow to elbow feeding the slots, nose to nose at the bar, side by side beneath towering fake trees with silk leaves — all God’s children gamble together. The Indians, blacks and whites of this God-fearingest region are working and playing in an amalgamation that would make the late Ross Barnett shudder. The casino seems to have accomplished what churches, outsiders, the government and schools never could — total integration.
It is a miracle, that’s all.
Silver Star Resort & Casino is no skating rink-sized gaming hall on a poor reservation, either. Mississippi has become the Monaco of the Southeast, and the Choctaw casino is the state’s largest and most profitable. Annual revenues each year have exceeded $100 million. It employs 2,300 people, about one-third Choctaws, and the Silver Star manages regularly to fill a 12-story hotel.
But the Mississippi Choctaws are mostly Baptist, too, and the vote to build or not to build was as close and troublesome here as it has been in other Southern places.
“When there came the choice for gaming, this tribe already was doing good,” Creda Stewart says. She works for the Office of Tribal Administration. “The casino won by only 2 percent.”
It’s true. Before the rise of Silver Star in 1994, Mississippi’s Choctaws already were being written up by national publications as a major economic success story. Unemployment had dropped almost 50 percentage points in less than two decades — and without gambling. Longtime Chief Phillip Martin, 72, was widely hailed as a hero, a regular guy who had returned home in the 1950s after a 10-year stint with the Air Force and led his people from welfare and poverty to pride and self-sufficiency.
The Choctaws first borrowed $500,000 from the government and started a factory that makes wire harnesses for cars. They display those high-tech harnesses next to traditional Choctaw baskets in a reservation musem.
From there, the industry expanded to best cheap car speakers, best car audio speakers for Ford and Chrysler, and later the Indians opened a greeting card factory and another for plastic injection molding. The tribe became Central Mississippi’s largest employer, with a work force that is half non-Indian.
 
“We’ve run out of Indians!” Martin told Forbes magazine.
Then came the Silver Star. Every Choctaw who wants a job now has one. Unemployment on the reservation today is 2 percent. All the industry has helped the tourism. The annual Choctaw Fair has become a real extravaganza. And when it is shift change at the Indian reservation, it can cause a traffic jam on the road to little Philadelphia, where Indians and blacks once were forced to sit apart from whites in movie houses and restaurants.
The Nevada-based Boyd Gaming Corp. loaned the tribe the $37 million to build the casino. Boyd gets 30 percent of operating income for the first five years of its seven-year management contract and then 40 percent the last two years.
But the Choctaws are doing better than ever, building schools, roads, new homes and good will. The recently renovated Choctaw fire department boasts a new $600,000 truck that can reach 10 stories. The head of Sweden’s government recently toured the reservation and raved about the new wastewater treatment plant. There are new schools and plenty of scholarships.
There also remain reservations about gambling on the reservation. Crime has increased, across the board, according to Neshoba County Sheriff’s Deputy Pheris Savell.
“Not as much as I thought it would, though,” Savell admits. “You get more people, you get more crime. Now for every 10 cars you see, five of them are from another state.”
‘Never been out there’
And there are still conscientious objectors to the South’s booming gambling industry. Faye McCullough, for example, runs the Rug Barn, a colorful compound of tents, trailers and trucks located at a busy intersection near the casino.

“I’ve never been out there,” she says, “but I don’t condemn those who go. There are church people who say they go to the casino restaurants, not to gamble. But if I’m seen there, nobody knows for sure what I’ve been doing. My testimony is ruined.
“Besides,” McCullough continues, running her hand across one of her faux-Indian rugs, “when you see toys in a pawn shop, you know something’s bad wrong. People come by here and try to pawn their watches for gas money to get home. I ask if they’ve been to the casino. If they have, I don’t feel sorry for them.”
There are now 25 pawn shops listed in the Philadelphia-area Yellow Pages in or near the town of 6,800. Pop’s Gun & Pawn, Easy Pawn, Ideal Title Pawn.
And for all the newfound Choctaw prosperity, you have to wonder about what’s been traded. The woods of Neshoba County no longer are dark; the neon at Silver Star lights them. The roads are jammed, even on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.
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Across the state in the Mississippi Delta, mallards fly over Tunica County’s garish casino community, their wings lit by purple strobes. And on the Gulf Coast, where once shrimp boats bobbed and the Mississippi Sound lapped the shore, an unbroken line of casino barges float, hiding the beach and happy dolphins and barrier islands that once were visible on a clear day.
Where there was tranquility, there is prosperity. Where there was apartheid, there is a truce.