Mr. Jordan — who died of pancreatic cancer in November, having learned about it just a few months earlier — proved immensely popular and effective in office. After being ignored by the previous mayor, a black woman in Greenville was surprised when Mr. Jordan telephoned her to respond to her concern about a derelict vacant lot. He was succeeded by a well-respected white lawyer named John Cox.

A similar story unfolded in Indianola, population just 10,600. Mayor Steve Rosenthal’s family came to the Delta from Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. He attended the Indianola schools and graduated from the University of Memphis. Like most Delta Jews, his ancestors established a dry goods store, which Mr. Rosenthal owned and operated for years.

A store in a Delta town means daily interaction with both white and black residents; decades of relationships and civility engendered trust among Indianola’s black population. Mr. Rosenthal, a Democrat, has run his administration the same way he ran his store: business-minded and community-focused.

Meanwhile, Mayor Carolyn McAdams was raised in Greenwood, population 15,000, and attended Mississippi State College for Women. Before her election, she worked for the housing agency in Greenwood and as an accountant for a private company. Her frequent professional contact with African-Americans made her transition to politics natural.

Interestingly, “The Help,” the popular movie that pilloried Southern white women, was filmed in Greenwood. But Ms. McAdams, like Mr. Jordan a political independent, hardly fits the caricatures presented in the film. While she was campaigning, an African-American woman picked her up and said, “Honey, we’ve been waiting for you.” Mayor McAdams has balanced the city’s budget for the first time in years.

How could this happen in an area so identified with racial turmoil? It’s easy: beneath the easy assumptions about racial animosity in the South, a different ethos prevails. The races interact daily in these small towns. Despite the oppressive Jim Crow system of the past, people know one another intimately. Trust, it turns out, trumps race. That doesn’t mean racial tension doesn’t exist. But there’s a capacity to look beyond it, born of lifelong intimate contact, that’s rarely found in larger cities.

Each of these towns experienced the civil rights movement. They also experienced mechanization, which displaced the black labor force. When the promise of the civil rights revolution was challenged by the realities of deindustrialization, hope was replaced by disappointment and disillusionment. The moral clarity of the struggle against legal segregation was replaced by de facto segregation and self-segregation — a problem hardly unique to the South.