Undeveloped America

Deserved it.

Having grown up in the Deep South, I can tell you the problem isn't racism so much these days as it is a subculture that disrespects the well-educated.
After all, it's kind of hard for racism to still be causing trouble when there are so few whites left in all of Mississippi or most of the rest of the South other than the larger cities.
Notice how poor the South is in general?
Well that makes for a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty because tax revenues are where the public school systems get their money from. Poor schools = poor education = poor people and not enough money to have truly progressive schools and then when you add in a cultural disrespect for becoming well-educated, it really becomes nasty.

Another thing that causes trouble for the South are its "right to work" laws. Because of them, most industry that typically uses labor union workers won't relocate to the South for fear of offending the powerful labor unions of the North and that keeps lots of higher paying factory jobs out of the south. But it goes a bit deeper than just that. Most factories now require workers capable of operating high tech equipment and that generally means that their workers all graduate both high school and then attend either a trade school or a junior college to acquire the necessary job skills.
Remember what I said about the culture disrespecting education AND the fact that they have poor school systems? Many of the people living in these areas who graduated from high school are lucky if they can read and write on an eighth grade level. That doesn't prepare them for doing even junior college level work.

So you often wind up with a situation in which when a factory DOES relocate to somewhere in the South all the higher tech jobs are inevitably taken by people who move into the area along with the factory and not by people who already live there. (I should know. I used to read about the scandals that occurred when this happened several different times in MISS alone.) The locals simply did NOT have the education necessary to get themselves hired for the better-paying jobs at the new factories unless they were willing to undertake going to trade school or the local junior college to acquire the needed skills ON THEIR OWN TIME AND MONEY.

I hope this provides you with more of a 360 of what's really causing the poverty in the South.

BTW: I used to be made fun of throughout both grade school and high school for reading anything just for my own pleasure BY OTHER WHITE KIDS.
In this area, poor whites and poor blacks are very much alike in their negative views on education whereas better educated blacks and whites share a better opinion of education and what it might do for them.

I think just about every junta or other political movement that wants to control the People hates education, because educated people are harder to mislead. Doesn't mean it can't be done -- I see a lot of highly educated people who believe things that are outright wrong, while ignoring the evidence right in front of them -- but you have to at least form an argument instead of yelling patriotism and waving guns.

Actually it's very easy to control even educated people. All you have to do is control what they know. Once you control what they know you can largely control what they think as well.
Think about the 60's and the political environment of that era and contrast it with how things are now. People don't read the way they used to and very few people are as well informed about world affairs today as they were back then. These days the news is composed largely of sports or what some actor got up to over the weekend. You almost never hear about what happened in Europe or Asia even on the internet and it never happens on the TV news.
Back before my Hubby and I decided to get rid of our cable subscription, we watched the BBC News to find out what was actually going on in the world. We found it totally ironic that we heard more about American political happenings on the BBC than we ever did on any of the other channel news stations.
Do you see a pattern forming here? All you have to do to control people is to keep them ignorant of sensitive information. You'll never have to deal with crowds of angry picketers if they don't know about something that would make them mad.
The second step to controlling people is to convince them that there's no use in even trying to do anything. Anyone who's seen our falling voter turnout's over the past thirty years will agree that the powers that be have largely managed that.
Nobody cares whether you're educated or not these days because it's what you do with your education that counts.
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From a southerner: amen.
You get so much defensiveness about being from the south down here, but really some things, many things Truly Suck.

As for racism, it probably varies place to place. I agree with rhodielady to an extent, except that there is real racism still here at least some places. Segregated populations, institutionalized stuff, and lingering cultural stuff; for example a church that until very recently taught that black and white people went to separate heavens.
Granted, you often see places here where (mostly the poor) black and white people live side by side as neighbors and accept each other and the problems are more poverty and the Crab Bucket effect (pulling each other down) rather than intolerance.