Monday, October 7 Part 2 "Land Hunger" from "This Land Was Our Land"
Coming Up: pronoun antecedent quiz on Tuesday. (handed out last Tuesday, another copy below); New reading: Part III "The Great Dispossession" (class handout/ copy below; this reading is due tomorrow, Tuesday, October 8.
In class: responses to Part II, "Land Hunger" from "This Was Our Land". Notebook Response to Part II "Land Hunger"
Weaving in textual evidence from your reading, respond to the following questions in complete sentences.
1. How were black workers able to afford land?
2. By 1900, how much farm land was owned by African Americans?
3. How did Oliver Cromwell, a "notorious bad Negro" express his "self-sufficiency" against the oppressive system? Weave in substantial text.
4. In a well-written paragraph of no fewer than five sentences, explain why Ed Scott Sr. was successful in acquiring a substanial amount of land. Consider what he did and did not do. Make sure to weave in substantial text from the reading.
When you have finised responding in your notebooks, begin reading and annotating Part III, "The Great Dispossession", which is due tomorrow.
This
Was Our Land
Part III by Vann R. Newkirk III
III. The Great
Dispossession
That era of black
ownership, in the Delta and throughout the country, was already fading by the
time Scott died. As the historian Pete Daniel recounts, half a million
black-owned farms across the country failed in the 25 years after 1950. Joe
Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in
1972 to fight the problem of dispossession, has estimated that something on the
order of 6 million acres was lost by black farmers from 1950 to 1969. That’s an
average of 820 acres a day—an area the size of New York’s Central Park erased
with each sunset. Black-owned cotton farms in the South almost completely
disappeared, diminishing from 87,000 to just over 3,000 in the 1960s alone.
According to the Census of Agriculture, the racial disparity in farm acreage
increased in Mississippi from 1950 to 1964, when black farmers lost almost
800,000 acres of land. An analysis for The Atlantic by a research team that
included Dania Francis, at the University of Massachusetts, and Darrick
Hamilton, at Ohio State, translates this land loss into a financial loss—including
both property and income—of $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today’s dollars.
This was a
silent and devastating catastrophe, one created and maintained by federal
policy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal life raft for agriculture
helped start the trend in 1937 with the establishment of the Farm Security
Administration, an agency within the Department of Agriculture. Although the
FSA ostensibly existed to help the country’s small farmers, as happened with
much of the rest of the New Deal, white administrators often ignored or
targeted poor black people—denying them loans and giving sharecropping work to
white people. After Roosevelt’s death, in 1945, conservatives in Congress
replaced the FSA with the Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA. The FmHA
quickly transformed the FSA’s programs for small farmers, establishing the sinews
of the loan-and-subsidy structure that undergirds American agriculture today.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s administration created the Agricultural
Stabilization and Conservation Service, or ASCS, a complementary program to the
FmHA that also provided loans to farmers. The ASCS was a federal effort—also
within the Department of Agriculture—but, crucially, the members of committees
doling out money and credit were elected locally, during a time when black
people were prohibited from voting.Through these programs, and through massive crop and surplus purchasing, the USDA became the safety net, price-setter, chief investor, and sole regulator for most of the farm economy in places like the Delta. The department could offer better loan terms to risky farmers than banks and other lenders, and mostly outcompeted private credit. In his book Dispossession, Daniel calls the setup “agrigovernment.” Land-grant universities pumped out both farm operators and the USDA agents who connected those operators to federal money. Large plantations ballooned into even larger industrial crop factories as small farms collapsed. The mega-farms held sway over agricultural policy, resulting in more money, at better interest rates, for the plantations themselves. At every level of agrigovernment, the leaders were white.
In
Sunflower County, a man named Ted Keenan told investigators that in 1956, local
banks had denied him loans after a bad crop because of his position with the
NAACP, where he openly advocated for voting rights. The FmHA had denied him
loans as well. Keenan described how Eugene Fisackerly, the leader of the White
Citizens’ Council in Sunflower County, together with representatives of Senator
James Eastland, a notorious white supremacist who maintained a large plantation
there, had intimidated him into renouncing his affiliation with the NAACP and
agreeing not to vote. Only then did Eastland’s man call the local FmHA agent,
prompting him to reconsider Keenan’s loan.
A
landmark 2001 investigation by the Associated Press into extortion,
exploitation, and theft directed against black farmers uncovered more than 100
cases like Keenan’s. In the 1950s and ’60s, Norman Weathersby, a Holmes County
Chevrolet dealer who enjoyed a local monopoly on trucks and heavy farm
equipment, required black farmers to put up land as collateral for loans on
equipment. A close friend of his, William Strider, was the local FmHA agent.
Black farmers in the area claimed that the two ran a racket: Strider would
slow-walk them on FmHA loans, which meant they would then default on
Weathersby’s loans and lose their land to him. Strider and Weathersby were
reportedly free to run this racket because black farmers were shut out by local
banks.
Thousands
of individual decisions by white people, enabled or motivated by greed, racism,
existing laws, and market forces, all pushed in a single direction.
Analyzing
the history of federal programs, the Emergency Land Fund emphasizes a key
distinction. While most of the black land loss appears on its face to have been
through legal mechanisms—“the tax sale; the partition sale;
and the foreclosure”—it mainly stemmed from illegal pressures,
including discrimination in federal and state programs, swindles by lawyers and
speculators, unlawful denials of private loans, and even outright acts of
violence or intimidation. Discriminatory loan servicing and loan denial by
white-controlled FmHA and ASCS committees forced black farmers into
foreclosure, after which their property could be purchased by wealthy
landowners, almost all of whom were white. Discrimination by private lenders
had the same result. Many black farmers who escaped foreclosure were defrauded
by white tax assessors who set assessments too high, leading to unaffordable
tax obligations. The inevitable result: tax sales, where, again, the land was
purchased by wealthy white people. Black people’s lack of access to legal services
complicated inheritances and put family claims to title in jeopardy. Lynchings,
police brutality, and other forms of intimidation were sometimes used to
dispossess black farmers, and even when land wasn’t a motivation for such
actions, much of the violence left land without an owner.
In
interviews with researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American
History in 1985, Henry Woodard Sr., an African American who had bought land in
the 1950s in Tunica County, said he had managed to keep up for years through a
combination of his own industry, small loans from the FmHA and white banks, and
the rental of additional land from other hard-pressed black landowners. Then,
in 1966, the activist James Meredith—whose 1962 fight to integrate Ole Miss sparked
deadly riots and a wave of white backlash—embarked on the famous March
Against Fear. The next planting season, Woodard recalled, his white lenders
ignored him. “I sensed that it was because of this march,” he said. “And it was
a lady told me—I was at the post office and she told me, she said, ‘Henry, you
Negroes, y’all want to live like white folks. Y’all don’t know how white folks
live. But y’all are gonna have to be on your own now.’ ”
Woodard’s
story would have been familiar to countless farmers in the Delta. In Holmes
County, a crucible of the voting-rights movement, a black effort to integrate
the local ASCS committees was so successful that it was subject to surveillance
and sabotage by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an official
agency created by Governor J. P. Coleman in 1956 to resist integration. Black
landowners involved in running for the committees or organizing for votes faced
fierce retaliation. In 1965, The New Republic reported that in
Issaquena County, just north of Vicksburg, the “insurance of Negroes active in
the ASCS elections had been canceled, loans were denied to Negroes on all crops
but cotton, and ballots were not mailed to Negro wives who were co-owners of
land.” Even in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,
formal and informal complaints against the USDA poured out of the Delta.
These
cases of dispossession can only be called theft. While the civil-rights era is
remembered as a time of victories against disenfranchisement and segregation,
many realities never changed. The engine of white wealth built on
kleptocracy—which powered both Jim Crow and its slave-state precursor—continued
to run. The black population in Mississippi declined by almost one-fifth from
1950 to 1970, as the white population increased by the exact same percentage.
Farmers slipped away one by one into the night, appearing later as laborers in
Chicago and Detroit. By the time black people truly gained the ballot in
Mississippi, they were a clear minority, held in thrall to a white conservative
supermajority.
Mass
dispossession did not require a central organizing force or a grand conspiracy.
Thousands of individual decisions by white people, enabled or motivated by
greed, racism, existing laws, and market forces, all pushed in a single
direction. But some white people undeniably would have organized it this way if
they could have. The civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin reported in 1956 that
documents taken from the office of Robert Patterson, one of the founding
fathers of the White Citizens’ Councils, proposed a “master plan” to force
hundreds of thousands of black people from Mississippi in order to reduce their
potential voting power. Patterson envisioned, in Rustin’s words, “the decline
of the small independent farmer” and ample doses of “economic pressure.”
An
upheaval of this scale and speed—the destruction of black farming, an
occupation that had defined the African American experience—might in any other
context be described as a revolution, or seen as a historical fulcrum. But it
came and went with little remark.
Pronoun antecedents Grammar assessment on this exact material on Tuesday, October 8
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