Wednesday, October 2 "The Great Land Robbery" introductory material

: 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: Quiz on pronoun antecedents on Tuesday, October 8.  I am giving you the exact same material early. Your responsibility is to make sure your know the correct usage.  Take the time to check your responses and make sure you understand the material. (class handout/ copy below)
Here is the pronoun chart that several students requested. Look this over and use this as a resource.

 In class: Introduction to "This Land Was Our Land" by Vann R. Newkirt II  Newkirk, Vann r. “This Land Was Our Land.”
1) We are watching the introductory material to Part I in class. If you are absent, please make sure you have watched this. Link below.
2) READING: you are responsible to read PART I by Friday. Class handout / copy below. Please expect to be writing a notebook response. As you read through the material, underline any words with which you are unfamiliar. 
  
/the great land robbery 15 min

   “This Land Was Our Land” by Vann R. Newkirk III     Part 1: Wiped Out

I. Wiped Out

“you ever chop before?” Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in Mississippi’s Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands, Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns out.

Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding. I had labored long hours over other crops, but had to admit to Scott-White, a 60-something grandmother who’d grown up chopping, that I’d never done it.

Willena Scott-White’s son Joseph White cutting grass at the edge of a field on Scott-family land, Mound Bayou, Mississippi (Zora J. Murff)

“Then you ain’t never worked,” she replied.

The fields alongside us as we drove were monotonous. With row crops, monotony is good. But as we toured 1,000 acres of land in Leflore and Bolivar Counties, straddling Route 61, Scott-White pointed out the demarcations between plots. A trio of steel silos here. A post there. A patch of scruffy wilderness in the distance. Each landmark was a reminder of the Scott legacy that she had fought to keep—or to regain—and she noted this with pride. Each one was also a reminder of an inheritance that had once been stolen.

Drive Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta and you’ll find much of the scenery exactly as it was 50 or 75 years ago. Imposing plantations and ramshackle shotgun houses still populate the countryside from Memphis to Vicksburg. Fields stretch to the horizon. The hands that dig into black Delta dirt belong to people like Willena Scott-White, African Americans who bear faces and names passed down from men and women who were owned here, who were kept here, and who chose to stay here, tending the same fields their forebears tended.

But some things have changed. Back in the day, snow-white bolls of King Cotton reigned. Now much of the land is green with soybeans. The farms and plantations are much larger—industrial operations with bioengineered plants, laser-guided tractors, and crop-dusting drones. Fewer and fewer farms are still owned by actual farmers. Investors in boardrooms throughout the country have bought hundreds of thousands of acres of premium Delta land. If you’re one of the millions of people who have a retirement account with the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, for instance, you might even own a little bit yourself.

TIAA is one of the largest pension firms in the United States. Together with its subsidiaries and associated funds, it has a portfolio of more than 80,000 acres in Mississippi alone, most of them in the Delta. If the fertile crescent of Arkansas is included, TIAA holds more than 130,000 acres in a strip of counties along the Mississippi River. And TIAA is not the only big corporate landlord in the region. Hancock Agricultural Investment Group manages more than 65,000 acres in what it calls the “Delta states.” The real-estate trust Farmland Partners has 30,000 acres in and around the Delta. AgriVest, a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS, owned 22,000 acres as of 2011. (AgriVest did not respond to a request for more recent information.)
Unlike their counterparts even two or three generations ago, black people living and working in the Delta today have been almost completely uprooted from the soil—as property owners, if not as laborers. In Washington County, Mississippi, where last February TIAA reportedly bought 50,000 acres for more than $200 million, black people make up 72 percent of the population but own only 11 percent of the farmland, in part or in full. In Tunica County, where TIAA has acquired plantations from some of the oldest farm-owning white families in the state, black people make up 77 percent of the population but own only 6 percent of the farmland. In Holmes County, the third-blackest county in the nation, black people make up about 80 percent of the population but own only 19 percent of the farmland. TIAA owns plantations there, too. In just a few years, a single company has accumulated a portfolio in the Delta almost equal to the remaining holdings of the African Americans who have lived on and shaped this land for centuries.

This is not a story about TIAA—at least not primarily. The company’s newfound dominance in the region is merely the topsoil covering a history of loss and legally sanctioned theft in which TIAA played no part. But TIAA’s position is instrumental in understanding both how the crimes of Jim Crow have been laundered by time and how the legacy of ill-gotten gains has become a structural part of American life. The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.

Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct, and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.

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Pronoun 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).