African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950: Volume 1 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826219608 ISBN 13: 9780826219602

Publisher: University of Missouri Press, 2011

Synopsis

During the first half of the twentieth century, degradation, poverty, and hopelessness were commonplace for African Americans who lived in the South's countryside, either on farms or in rural communities. Many southern blacks sought relief from these conditions by migrating to urban centers. Many others, however, continued to live in rural areas. Scholars of African American rural history in the South have been concerned primarily with the experience of blacks as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, textile workers, and miners. Less attention has been given to other aspects of the rural African American experience during the early twentieth century. African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950 provides important new information about African American culture, social life, and religion, as well as economics, federal policy, migration, and civil rights. The essays particularly emphasize the efforts of African Americans to negotiate the white world in the southern countryside. Filling a void in southern studies, this outstanding collection provides a substantive overview of the subject. Scholars, students, and teachers of African American, southern, agricultural, and rural history will find this work invaluable.

About this title

About the Author

R. Douglas Hurt is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies at Iowa State University in Ames. He is the author of numerous books, including Nathan Boone and the American Frontier and Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie, both available from the University of Missouri Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE IN THE RURAL SOUTH 1900–1950

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Copyright © 2003 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1960-2

Contents

Introduction R. DOUGLAS HURT.............................................................................................................................................................1"Lookin' for Better All the Time": Rural Migration and Urbanization in the South, 1900–1950 LOUIS M. KYRIAKOUDES...................................................................10"A Crude and Raw Past": Work, Folklife, and Anti-Agrarianism in Twentieth-Century African American Autobiography TED OWNBY...............................................................27"Of the Least and the Most": The African American Rural Church LOIS E. MYERS AND REBECCA SHARPLESS.......................................................................................54Shifting Boundaries: Race Relations in the Rural Jim Crow South MELISSA WALKER...........................................................................................................81African American Rural Culture, 1900–1950 VALERIE GRIM.............................................................................................................................108Benign Public Policies, Malignant Consequences, and the Demise of African American Agriculture WILLIAM P. BROWNE.........................................................................129"I Have Been through Fire": Black Agricultural Extension Agents and the Politics of Negotiation JEANNIE WHAYNE...........................................................................152Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: African American Strategies for Day-to-Day Existence/Resistance in the Early-Twentieth-Century Rural South PETER COCLANIS AND BRYANT SIMON.....................189Suggested Readings........................................................................................................................................................................211Contributors..............................................................................................................................................................................219Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................223

Chapter One

"Lookin' for Better All the Time"

Rural Migration and Urbanization in the South, 1900–1950

LOUIS M. KYRIAKOUDES

Sometime around the year 1900 Samuel Dean, a black sharecropper's son, left his family farm in the Bedford County community of Flat Creek, Tennessee, for the county seat of Shelbyville. Not making enough money in Shelbyville, Dean soon moved to Nashville, where he found work in a feed mill. Dean punctuated his stay there with a stint in the meatpacking plants of St. Louis, followed by a brief foray to Akron, Ohio, during World War I before returning again to Nashville. When asked by a Works Progress Administration interviewer in the 1930s why he had moved to so many places so frequently, Dean responded, "I was lookin' for better all the time."

Dean's "lookin'" and the numerous moves he undertook complicate our view of the early-twentieth-century southern rural exodus we call the Great Migration. The migration that swept black southerners to the cities of the North and West was just one portion of a broader black and white exodus from southern agriculture. Dean's story suggests that the frequent moves of black and white southerners created migration patterns of great complexity. Highly mobile rural southerners moved across the rural South, seeking greater opportunities in the region's tenancy-dominated agriculture. Others poured into southern cities or left the region altogether for the urban North, seeking greater economic opportunity and an escape from what James Weldon Johnson once characterized as "the tremendous shore of southern barbarism."

Historians have examined carefully the pull of northern migration. The very visible and dramatic arrival of large numbers of black southerners in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh has ensured that the chief emphasis of scholarship on the Great Migration would lie with these important destinations. Yet by looking carefully at migration patterns among those rural southerners, white and black, who remained in the region, we can sort out some of the less visible changes in the relationship between rural labor markets and agriculture to understand how migration fit into the life strategies of rural black southerners. By doing so, we can understand not only those who left, but also those who chose to stay behind.

Early-twentieth-century observers understood that the cityward migration of black and white southerners marked the beginning of a profound demographic shift in the region. Around the turn of the century, Howard University mathematics professor and pioneering African American demographer Kelly Miller noted that the "general drift of the [Negro] population at large [is] towards overcrowded [urban] centers." In 1906 journalist Ray Stannard Baker, visiting an Atlanta bursting with blacks and whites fresh from southern farms, noted that "the opportunities of the city have attracted the black people, just as they have the whites, in large numbers." Twenty years later, Chapel Hill regionalist T. J. Woofter, Jr., similarly observed that "both in the South and the North the trend of the Negro population is definitely cityward."

The migration of black southerners to northern cities operated as one element in a much larger rural exodus by both blacks and whites. Baker believed that black migrants were "responding to exactly the same natural laws that control white farmers." Writing in 1920 as the war-era wave of black migration northward was nearing completion, Woofter argued that "there are very few counties in the South where the colored and white people do not move in the same direction in response to the same situations." Black observers were quick to point out that racial oppression drove blacks from the South's farms and the region. Separating race oppression from economic motives creates a false distinction. The patterns of race oppression were so deeply interwoven into the economic context of the sharecropping system as to be inseparable. The oppressiveness of the southern racial caste system as it developed after Reconstruction directly supported the economic subjugation of black workers both in industry and agriculture. The contours of the sharecropping system, with its promotion of excessive cotton cultivation and inefficient credit and marketing institutions, sapped the meager returns of small southern farmers, black and white. William J. Edwards, an Alabama-based African American educator, acknowledged the plight of black southerners, but concluded that race oppression "may be all classed as the secondary cause of this great exodus." Hardship drove rural blacks to a life in cities. "These people are hungry, they are naked, they have no corn and had no cotton; so they are without food and clothes. What else can they do but go away in search of work?" wondered Edwards in 1918, during the midst of the Great Migration's first wave.

In fact, moving was a central feature of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century southern rural life. Southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers—black and white—had always been highly mobile, seeking better land and better terms. Some black farmers, moved by the "pioneering spirit," as Carter Woodson described it, went west. Most famous was the well-organized movement of the "exodusters," which left Nashville in 1879 for Kansas. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the Mississippi Delta continued to draw black southerners searching for lower farm rents and higher wages. Writing of his youth in South Carolina during the 1880s, William Pickens recalled that his parents were "farmers of the tenant or day-labor class and were ever on the move from cabin to cabin, with the proverbial unacquisitiveness of the 'rolling stone.'" In 1888 Pickens's father contracted with a labor agent to move the family from their home in South Carolina to the Arkansas Delta, "where the soil was fertile and wages high." Moving west offered little relief. Mired in debt to finance the move, Pickens's father sharecropped and worked as a logger to keep his family fed. Failing to get ahead in the Arkansas Delta, he moved the family again to a farm near Little Rock. Despite "no less than twenty removals of our family" before Pickens reached the age of eighteen in 1899, his father was unable to extricate them from the grinding poverty of the sharecropping regime. The West beckoned, but opportunities were not forthcoming.

Well into the twentieth century, seasonal farm labor migration patterns carried young black men to work the wheat harvests of Texas and Oklahoma. These young men would head west, following the annual harvest as the crop ripened. Most would return to their homes in the South at the end of the season, but many "remain[ed] as wage hands the following year," working as hired farm help. On the East Coast, the advent of the 1920s farm depression sent southern blacks on the road as migrant laborers, working the fruit and vegetable crops in the burgeoning truck farms of Florida and New Jersey.

The structure of the sharecropping system compelled black southerners to move frequently. Sharecropper contracts were year-to-year, and changing farms could offer the hope of any number of improvements: lower rents, the chance to farm more productive land, access to healthier workstock and better implements, better housing, or less demanding or more honest landlords. Typical was Athey Pierce, an Alabama sharecropper who testified before congressional investigators that he had recently moved from one farm to another because "the man wouldn't have the house fixed up ... every time it rained everything in the house would get wet." Tenant and sharecroppers, black and white, would engage in the annual search for something better.

Hosea Hudson, the Birmingham labor activist, knew well share-cropping's peripatetic ways. Hudson recalled of his youth in the Georgia Black Belt that "we were always moving, always in the hope of finding a landlord who would not take advantage of us." From 1903 to 1918, when Hudson married and struck out on his own, his family moved at least nine times. In 1903, when Hudson was only five years old, their landlord seized not only the family's cotton crop but also their hogs and cows to settle an outstanding debt. The family then moved to a nearby plantation, "stayed one year, made a crop and moved on." Hudson's family moved again in 1906, every year from 1909 through 1913, and again in 1916 and 1917. Along the way, Hudson's family farmed for two black landlords, who treated them no better than their white counterparts, and his grandmother's white half brother. Despite the many moves, Hudson recalled, the family "hardly ever succeeded in bettering our condition."

While mobility among tenant farmers and sharecroppers could be quite high, contemporary social surveys confirm that its spatial scope was quite limited. A 1926 study of black farmers in Southampton County, Virginia, found that virtually all tenant farmers had changed farms at some point in their lives, with an average of four years and three months passing between each move. Despite the high farm-to-farm mobility, Southampton County tenants rarely ventured from their immediate locality: 81 percent did not change their church, school, or "trading center" upon moving. Another 1924 study of tenant farmers across ninety-three southern plantation counties found similar levels of farm-to-farm mobility among both blacks and whites. Among black farmers, 39.6 percent remained on their farms one year or less, with more than three-quarters changing farms within a four-year period. Whites were even more eager to move. Fifty-three percent of white tenants moved within a year and 83 percent did so within four years. Depression-era mobility patterns resembled those of the 1920s. T. J. Woofter's expansive survey of 5,060 farm families residing on 646 cotton plantations found that white sharecroppers averaged 4.4 years on a farm, while their black counterparts averaged 5.6 years.

The logic of sharecropping shaped these localized mobility patterns. Since credit markets were local, for the poorest tenants—those owning neither tools nor workstock—a reputation for skill and hard work could be their only capital asset. Hence, many tenant farmers tended to stay in the same general vicinity where they were well known among those who acted as the gatekeepers to credit in the sharecropping system: local landlords and furnishing merchants. The converse was true as well. Tenant farmers who wanted to escape a reputation for intractability, ineptitude, or for challenging established patterns of racial subservience had an incentive to move farther away, to where they were not known.

The high turnover among sharecroppers did not generally lead to debt peonage in the classic sense of restrained mobility. Those who have argued that debt peonage tied black sharecroppers to particular landlords, thus leading to the "metamorphosis of slavery," have overstated their case. Sharecroppers moved too frequently. When an indebted sharecropper sought a new farm, the merchant or landlord who held his debt sought to levy personal property, as in the case of Tom Glenn's seizure of the livestock of Hosea Hudson's family. When there was no property to seize, landlords wrote off the debt.

Landlords and furnishing merchants were inclined to write off bad debts because the usurious interest rates they charged sharecroppers for the credit necessary to acquire their annual "furnish" of seed, fertilizer, other supplies, and provisions provided little incentive to carry heavily indebted sharecropper families from year to year. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch's study of late-nineteenth-century sharecropping estimated that in the 1880s the annual interest rate sharecroppers paid on their furnish averaged 59.1 percent, but ranged anywhere from 44.2 to 74.6 percent. Not much had changed by the 1930s, when T. J. Woofter found interest rates ranging from 50 to 75 percent. Another depression-era cotton plantation survey concluded that sharecroppers' annual interest rates "remained two to three times as high" as what the landlords and merchants were themselves paying for short-term credit.

Thus, as Hosea Hudson's case indicates, mobility did not translate into improving conditions for the great mass of sharecroppers and tenants. The constant shifting from farm to farm did little to undermine the fundamentals of the sharecropping system as too many farmers sought to farm too much cotton, remaining mired in debt, even as the landlords for whom they labored changed from year to year. The sharecropping system operated as a treadmill, circulating landless farm families within fairly well-established local migration networks while offering them little by way of improvement in their economic prospects.

This treadmill was only disrupted when a series of economic and demographic shocks beset the rural South in the 1910s and continued through World War II, disrupting sharecropping's mobility patterns and sending blacks and whites pouring out of the rural South on their way to cities in the South and North. The Great Migration has been viewed by demographers as the result of a series of "push" and "pull" factors operating together to prevail upon black southerners to move. Students of the migration have long stressed the economic pushes of low agricultural incomes, high rates of tenancy, and limited opportunities to ascend the agricultural ladder to join the ranks of the farm-owning. The short-term shock of boll weevil infestation in the heart of the plantation belt devastated cotton crops and also increased production costs as outlays for insecticide were added to the sharecropper's furnish. The cessation of European immigration in 1914 and wartime employment demands drew black and white southerners to the urban North, thus beginning the Great Migration.

In addition to these economic pushes and pulls, which operated across both races, albeit unequally, there was the powerful push of race subjugation. Blacks fleeing the rural South fled exclusion from the political process, injustice in the courts, abysmal schools for their children, and a social order where deference to whites in all spheres of public life was expected and enforced with violence. Demographers Stuart Tolnay and E. M. Beck have found a reciprocal relationship between the out-migration of blacks from southern counties and the incidence of lynching in the 1910s and 1920s. Tolnay and Beck find that blacks were most likely to migrate from areas where racial violence was most prevalent. More interesting, however, is their finding that high black out-migration tended to reduce future levels of racial violence. Thus Tolnay and Beck confirm what other scholars have also found, that black migration tended to result in less oppressive conditions as white employers responded in their own interest to localized labor shortages.

While the World War I–era African American migration northward was highly visible, it was not so massive as to disrupt or depopulate the rural South, which before World War II was a thickly populated region. Southerners were a highly fecund people who exhibited the highest fertility in the nation. As indicated by Table 1, the ratio of children younger than five per one thousand women ages fifteen to forty-nine, a standard indicator of fertility, substantially exceeded the national average during the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, the rural population of the South grew steadily, rising from 17.8 to 22.7 million during the period from 1900 to 1940. Only after the massive rural out-migration of the World War II decade did the region's rural population level off and begin a slow decline, falling to 22.5 million by 1950.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Missouri Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826219608
• ISBN 13: 9780826219602
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Hurt R. Douglas