Monte Carlo " was notorious as the poorest county in the poorest state in the country even before 1985, when Jesse Jackson declared that he had found "America's Ethiopia" there. Life for Tunica's black majority started out hard and got no easier, as statistics from the 1980s testify. The county recorded America's eighth highest infant-mortality rate, the fourth highest percentage of births to teenage mothers, the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line, and the lowest median household income. In 1984, 70 percent of residents over the age of twenty-five had no high school diploma. Nearly a quarter of the houses lacked modern plumbing. The filthy tin-and-wood shacks that disgusted Jackson rotted along "Sugar Ditch" Alley, named for the open sewer that ran through it. Such infamy inspired a few federal housing projects, but in 1992 the county was still a symbol of rural poverty. Tunica's unemployment levels wera among the highast in Mississippi, and many of those who had jobs did not make enough money to get off welfare. That year more than half the county relied on food stamps..."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/01/monte-carlo-mississippi/306245/