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

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826219608 ISBN 13: 9780826219602

Verlag: University of Missouri Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Missouri Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826219608
• ISBN 13: 9780826219602
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 227
• Herausgeber: Hurt R. Douglas
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar