Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma - Softcover

Forner, Karlyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822370050 ISBN 13: 9780822370055

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma Karlyn Forner rewrites the heralded story of Selma to explain why gaining the right to vote did not bring about economic justice for African Americans in the Alabama Black Belt. Drawing on a rich array of sources, Forner illustrates how voting rights failed to offset decades of systematic disfranchisement and unequal investment in African American communities. Forner contextualizes Selma as a place, not a moment within the civil rights movement -a place where black citizens' fight for full citizenship unfolded alongside an agricultural shift from cotton farming to cattle raising, the implementation of federal divestment policies, and economic globalization. At the end of the twentieth century, Selma's celebrated political legacy looked worlds apart from the dismal economic realities of the region. Forner demonstrates that voting rights are only part of the story in the black freedom struggle and that economic justice is central to achieving full citizenship.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karlyn Forner is Project Manager of the SNCC Digital Gateway at Duke University Libraries.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma

By Karlyn Forner

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-7005-5

Contents

Illustrations, 
Abbreviations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
CHAPTER 1 The World That Cotton Made: 1901–1916, 
CHAPTER 2 "Our Country First, Then Selma": 1917–1929, 
CHAPTER 3 Plowing Under: 1932–1940, 
CHAPTER 4 Becoming White-Faced Cows: 1941–1952, 
CHAPTER 5 Segregation's Last Stand: 1953–1964, 
CHAPTER 6 Making the "Good Freedom": 1965–1976, 
CHAPTER 7 "Last One Out of Selma, Turn Off the Lights": 1977–1988, 
CHAPTER 8 Two Selmas: 1989–2000, 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The World That Cotton Made

1901–1916

Selma was a small but bustling town, perched high on the banks of the Alabama River. The wide, murky waters meandered west from the state capital of Montgomery through the Black Belt and Dallas County before making their way down to the Gulf city of Mobile. Home to 8,713 residents in 1900, Selma was the county seat and the hub of Black Belt agriculture. It was, according to the Selma Morning Times, "a cotton town." The white, fleecy bolls ran the local economy, and cotton's annual cycle forged an inseparable relationship between the wider county and the city.

At the turn of the century, cotton supplied the direct or indirect livelihood of almost all of Dallas County's 54,657 residents: black tenants produced the year's crop; white landlords, wholesalers, and merchants made their business in its trade; and black servants and draymen and white industrial workers labored for the wages it supplied. Neither agriculture nor demographics had changed much in the forty years since the Civil War. In 1900, 83 percent of Dallas Countians were black, and most were bound to the cotton fields under tenant contracts.

White supremacy — the interlocking system of political, economic, and social control that protected white privilege — had long governed life in rural Dallas County. White landlords, wholesalers, and merchants dictated the terms, under which black men and women worked the fields for nearly nothing. Racial customs, enforced with violence when necessary, kept black tenants in their place. Along with cotton's ongoing dominion, the rise of Jim Crow, with its state-sanctioned legal segregation and disfranchisement, marked a new era for white supremacy at the start of the twentieth century. These developments further cemented the grossly unequal economic relationship between black and white Dallas Countians.

African Americans responded to the barrage of attacks by mobilizing their own resources. Building off of traditions of landownership, education, and self-sufficiency, black residents forged a semiautonomous world within the dictates of Jim Crow segregation. Selma University, the educational institution of the Alabama Colored Baptists, helped create a strong black middle class made up of doctors, educators, undertakers, business owners, and trades people. Churches, fraternal lodges, and benevolent societies offered support to black men and women, and small corner groceries and shops bound neighbors together. As their legal and political rights shrank, African Americans turned inward to protect their communities and foster black economic and social independence in whatever ways they could.

A Cotton Town

"The hopes of a whole year are tied up in a cotton crop, and when the first boll bursts open and its white silken fibre is exposed to the morning sun, a whole section is awakened into life," proclaimed the Selma Morning Times. It was August 1903, and the newspaper was anticipating the opening of the year's cotton season. Water Avenue, the main street of Selma, was where the buying and selling of cotton and goods took place. Despite its proximity to the Alabama River, clouds of dust still billowed behind streetcars and mule-drawn wagons, and stray cotton lint perpetually hung in the air. Wholesale establishments, commission houses, and cotton warehouses lined both sides of the bustling street. Nine wholesale grocery establishments, including R. H. and W. C. Agee Company, V. B. Atkins and Company, and C. W. Hooper and Company, garnered recognition throughout the Black Belt. Salesmen from the wholesale companies traveled through the surrounding counties, selling goods to the hundreds of crossroad clapboard stores and plantation commissaries dotting the countryside. Potholed dirt roads and limited transportation made the country stores the main source of goods for rural customers, and, with the help of wholesale merchants, they stocked everything from ribbons and coffee to kerosene oil. The trade area of Selma's wholesalers extended throughout the entire Black Belt, sixteen counties in a hundred-mile radius.

Wholesale merchants had cotton to thank for both their profits and their influence. In addition to selling goods, wholesalers doubled as commission merchants and cotton buyers. Landowners needed the annual profits of cotton to buy supplies and necessities and extend credit to their tenants, and wholesale merchants brought the complementary roles of cotton buying and grocery selling under one roof.

Sharecropping had first emerged after the Civil War. Along with completely upending the South's defining institution, four years of war had devastated the region's towns and farmlands. Landowners still needed the now-freed people to grow cotton, so they contracted with black tenants to live on and work their land each season. Landowners then turned to merchants for credit, a necessity in the cash-strapped region. Advancing merchants or plantation commissaries would furnish tenants with seeds and supplies to make the crop. Settlement came at harvest time each fall. Tenants turned over the bales from their summer's work to the advancing merchant or landlord, who then, in turn, brought the cotton to a cotton buyer or to the wholesale house with which they carried credit. Selma's wholesale establishments were known to charge 15 percent to advance credit and goods to merchants and plantation commissaries. People lived on borrowed money all year long, and the only payday in Dallas County came when the cotton was ready in the fall.

As the cotton gins across the county cranked into gear each September, Selma's streets sprang to life. Droves of cotton-laden wagons crowded the warehouses and compresses. Wholesale merchandising establishments worked late into the night. At M. Meyer and Company, clerks finalized purchases of cotton from farmers who had traveled long distances, while laborers unloaded the crop from the wagon and replaced it with provisions bought for the next year. A short distance away, the Dallas Compress Company packed the bales into smaller parcels, which were then stored in warehouses, like Erhart's, before being sold to buyers at the Selma Cotton Exchange.

Directly south of Water Avenue, the wharfs on the Alabama River overflowed with cotton bales. A storefront on the southern side of Selma's main street gave wholesale merchants direct access to the wharf from the back of their establishments. There, black draymen loaded thousands of bales onto steamers like the Nettie Quill and the Helen Burke, which departed for Mobile. Then the bales were loaded onto other ships bound for cotton mills in the East. The remaining bales shipped out of town on the railroads; the main depot was located just east of the wharf.

While...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822370050
• ISBN 13: 9780822370055
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 372
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande