Friday, October 4. Part II Land Hunger from "This Land Was Our Land"

:I can determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings. Analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning, tone, and mood, including words with multiple meanings. Analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of technical or key term(s) over the course of a text.
I can analyze how authors employ point of view, perspective, and purpose, to shape explicit and implicit messages.
I can use precise language, content-specific vocabulary and literary techniques to express the appropriate complexity of the topic.
I can use appropriate and varied transitions, as well as varied syntax, to make critical connections, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas and concepts.
 I can provide a concluding statement or section that explains the significance of the argument presented.
 I can maintain a style and tone appropriate to the writing task.

Coming up: pronoun antecedents on Tuesday, October 8. quiz is exactly the same as practice handout on Wednesday; another copy below.  
 Part II "Land Hunger" reading is due on Monday, October 7. (class handout / copy below). Expect a notebook response.

In class: notebook response to Part I (Wiped Out) from the Atlantic Monthly Article "This Was Our Land" by Vann R Newkirk II. (handed out Wednesday, October 2) 

Collect your notebooks; create an MLA heading with the title "Wiped Out"
Answer the following 5 questions based upon the film clip and your reading for part 1, followed by a rich response of no fewer than five sentences that explains why heritage is important with the story and to individuals in general.  There is no need to write complete sentences for the five questions.  You may use your handout.

1. Where does this investigative news story take place? (do not name the state)
2. What is the primary crop that has replaced cotton in this area?
3. Why did many African Americans leave Alabama and move to Mississippi?
4. Who at the end of the day owns most of the land in this area?

Answer either question 5 OR 6
    5. How much money did the Scot family win in the court case? 
                 OR
6. What has "legally" been used to dispossess "98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America?" 


PBS news review 8 minutes

II. “Land Hunger”

land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi. During Reconstruction, fierce resistance from the planters who had dominated antebellum society effectively killed any promise of land or protection from the Freedmen’s Bureau, forcing masses of black laborers back into de facto bondage. But the sheer size of the black population—black people were a majority in Mississippi until the 1930s—meant that thousands were able to secure tenuous footholds as landowners between Emancipation and the Great Depression.

Driven by what W. E. B. Du Bois called “land hunger” among freedmen during Reconstruction, two generations of black workers squirreled away money and went after every available and affordable plot they could, no matter how marginal or hopeless. Some found sympathetic white landowners who would sell to them. Some squatted on unused land or acquired the few homesteads available to black people. Some followed visionary leaders to all-black utopian agrarian experiments, such as Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County.

From March 1901: W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Freedmen’s Bureau’

It was never much, and it was never close to just, but by the early 20th century, black people had something to hold on to. In 1900, according to the historian James C. Cobb, black landowners in Tunica County outnumbered white ones three to one. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were 25,000 black farm operators in 1910, an increase of almost 20 percent from 1900. Black farmland in Mississippi totaled 2.2 million acres in 1910—some 14 percent of all black-owned agricultural land in the country, and the most of any state.

The foothold was never secure. From the beginning, even the most enterprising black landowners found themselves fighting a war of attrition, often fraught with legal obstacles that made passing title to future generations difficult. Bohlen Lucas, one of the few black Democratic politicians in the Delta during Reconstruction (most black politicians at the time were Republicans), was born enslaved and managed to buy a 200-acre farm from his former overseer. But, like many farmers, who often have to borrow against expected harvests to pay for equipment, supplies, and the rent or mortgage on their land, Lucas depended on credit extended by powerful lenders. In his case, credit depended specifically on white patronage, given in exchange for his help voting out the Reconstruction government—after which his patrons abandoned him. He was left with 20 acres.

In Humphreys County, Lewis Spearman avoided the pitfalls of white patronage by buying less valuable wooded tracts and grazing cattle there as he moved into cotton. But when cotton crashed in the 1880s, Spearman, over his head in debt, crashed with it.

Around the turn of the century, in Leflore County, a black farm organizer and proponent of self-sufficiency—referred to as a “notoriously bad Negro” in the local newspapers—led a black populist awakening, marching defiantly and by some accounts bringing boycotts against white merchants. White farmers responded with a posse that may have killed as many as 100 black farmers and sharecroppers along with women and children. The fate of the “bad Negro” in question, named Oliver Cromwell, is uncertain. Some sources say he escaped to Jackson, and into anonymity.

Like so many of his forebears, Ed Scott Sr., Willena Scott-White’s grandfather, acquired his land through not much more than force of will. As recorded in the thick binders of family history that Willena had brought along in the truck, and that we flipped through between stretches of work in the fields, his life had attained the gloss of folklore. He was born in 1886 in western Alabama, a generation removed from bondage. Spurred by that same land hunger, Scott took his young family to the Delta, seeking opportunities to farm his own property. He sharecropped and rented, and managed large farms for white planters, who valued his ability to run their sprawling estates. One of these men was Palmer H. Brooks, who owned a 7,000-acre plantation in Mississippi’s Leflore and Sunflower Counties. Brooks was uncommonly progressive, encouraging entrepreneurship among the black laborers on his plantation, building schools and churches for them, and providing loans. Scott was ready when Brooks decided to sell plots to black laborers, and he bought his first 100 acres.

Unlike Bohlen Lucas, Scott largely avoided politics. Unlike Lewis Spearman, he paid his debts and kept some close white allies—a necessity, since he usually rejected government assistance. And unlike Oliver Cromwell, he led his community under the rules already in place, appearing content with what he’d earned for his family in an environment of total segregation. He leveraged technical skills and a talent for management to impress sympathetic white people and disarm hostile ones. “Granddaddy always had nice vehicles,” Scott-White told me. They were a trapping of pride in a life of toil. As was true in most rural areas at the time, a new truck was not just a flashy sign of prosperity but also a sort of credit score. Wearing starched dress shirts served the same purpose, elevating Scott in certain respects—always within limits—even above some white farmers who drove into town in dirty overalls. The trucks got shinier as his holdings grew. By the time Scott died, in 1957, he had amassed more than 1,000 acres of farmland.

Scott-White guided me right up to the Quiver River, where the legend of her family began. It was a choked, green-brown gurgle of a thing, the kind of lazy waterway that one imagines to be brimming with fat, yawning catfish and snakes. “Mr. Brooks sold all of the land on the east side of this river to black folks,” Scott-White told me. She swept her arm to encompass the endless acres. “All of these were once owned by black families.”

Members of the extended Scott family. From the right: Isaac Daniel Scott Sr. and his wife, Lucy Chatman-Scott; Willena Scott-White; and Willena’s son Joseph White, with his daughter, Jade Marie White. (Zora J. Murff)

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 ronoun antecedents         Grammar assessment on this exact material on Tuesday, October 8

1.     Five of (we,  us,  ourselves) took a cab to the play

2.     Are you and (they, them, themselves) attending the meeting?

3.     No one is more concerned about the matter that (she, her, herself).

4.     (Who, Whom) can I go out with tonight?

5.     Margaret and (I, me, myself) hope to be roommates.

6.     The committee told Smith and (they, them, themselves) to write a new resolution.

7.     Is he the one (for who, whom) the note is intended?

8.     We discovered that it was (they, them, themselves) who started the fire.

9.     Everyone asked Joan and (he, him, himself) to speak at the convention.

10. A person as young as (she, her, herself) should not be given too much responsibility.

11. Jack was more certain about the matter than (she, her).

12. We don’t like the candidate (who, whom) you endorsed.

13. (Who, whom) shall I ask about the luggage situation?

14. The dog given to Paula and (he, him) has given them much pleasure.

15. It is unclear (who, whom) raised the most money.

16. The outcome of the election surprised me more than (him, he)

17. The teacher about (who, whom) you are asking is not here.

18. We don’t like the candidate (who, whom) you endorsed.

19.  I couldn’t tell whether it was George or (he, him) at the door.

20.   There is very little feeling between Janae and (I, me).