Remaking the Rural South

Remaking the Rural South PDF Author: Robert Hunt Ferguson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351792
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, the two communities that drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor in the 1930s and beyond.

Remaking the Rural South

Remaking the Rural South PDF Author: Robert Hunt Ferguson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351792
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Farm, the two communities that drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor in the 1930s and beyond.

Race and the Remaking of the Rural South

Race and the Remaking of the Rural South PDF Author: Robert Hunt Ferguson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Delta Cooperative Farm 1936-1942 and Providence Farm 1938-1956 were intentional communities in rural Mississippi that drew on Christian socialism, cooperative communalism, and social egalitarianism to enact progressive and leftist challenges to the South's racial hierarchy and labor practices. This dissertation demonstrates that even in the closed society that Mississippi represented, the rural poor and their leftist allies could challenge hegemonic social structures by employing a cooperative economy, operating a desegregated health clinic, holding interracial church and union meetings, and successfully managing a cooperative credit union. For twenty years, the farms were a beacon of hope and safe haven for southerners engaged in racial amelioration, labor reform, and black self-help. By the mid 1950s, however, the armies of massive resistance forced the closing of the remaining farm while internal racial tension bubbled to the surface among farm residents. The story of Delta and Providence is a measure of the possibilities for and obstacles to transformative change in the rural South during the mid-twentieth century. Race and the Rural South also places Delta and Providence within the context of the major social and economic changes taking place in the rural South from the Great Depression, through World War II, and into the early years of the classic phase of the civil rights movement. Dynamic labor activism in the 1930s rural South abated during the war years when agriculture further mechanized and many dirt farmers moved off the land and into factories. Civil rights activism, intimately entwined with labor unionism in the 1930s, was grounded in interracialism--black and white activists tackling their problems together--but World War II also changed this dynamic as whites left the farms. After World War II, African Americans living at Providence deliberately engaged in black self-help endeavors, using the farm as a sort of free space to carry out their visions for a democratic society. In these ways, Delta and Providence farms were representative of a rapidly changing region.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South PDF Author: Malinda Maynor Lowery
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina's Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship. Lowery argues that "Indian" is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of "Indian blood" (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of "black blood" (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities.

Cotton and Race in the Making of America

Cotton and Race in the Making of America PDF Author: Gene Dattel
Publisher: Government Institutes
ISBN: 1442210192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Discovering the South

Discovering the South PDF Author: Jennifer Ritterhouse
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469630958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.

Rooted in Place

Rooted in Place PDF Author: William W. Falk
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813534657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Through oral history, Falk (sociology, U. of Maryland, College Park) tells the story of those who stayed behind as millions of African Americans left the South in the Great Migration for what they hoped would be a better life in the North. Members of an extended family in the Georgia-South Carolina lowlands talk about schooling, kinship, work, religion, race, and their love of the place where their family has lived for generations. The "conversational ethnography" argues that a link between race and place in the area helps explain African American loyalty to it; for those who stayed put, a numerical majority, deep cultural roots, and longstanding webs of social connection have outweighed racism and economic disadvantages. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round

Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round PDF Author: Richard A. Couto
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780877228066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Includes a chapter on the Sea Islands of South Carolina.

Field Hollers And Freedom Songs: The Anthology

Field Hollers And Freedom Songs: The Anthology PDF Author: C. Sade Turnipseed
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648895824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Taking place annually in “the most southern place on earth,” aka, the “Cotton Kingdom,” the Sweat Equity Investment in the Cotton Kingdom Symposium offers a platform to honor, celebrate, and recognize the legacy of the African Americans who labored in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. The symposium intends to trigger discussions and provide a space where the histories and contributions of those Americans can be heard and learned from. Born in the antebellum south, the “soul of America” came to be through the tearful occupation of planting, chopping, picking and ginning cotton, where it was then brined within a system of enslavement, sharecropping and international trade that in so many ways provided America its “greatness.” Carefully compiled from works presented at the symposia, this anthology looks to expose the tortured “cotton-pickin’ spirit” embedded in America’s soul. A spirit that is rendered in song, chants, spoken word and field hollers, and revealed in this volume through the selected articles, lyric poetry, proverbs, speeches, slave narratives and workshop proposals. The rich and varied content of this book reflects the uniqueness of not only the Mississippi Delta but also the histories of those who lived and worked there.

To Know the Soul of a People

To Know the Soul of a People PDF Author: Jamil W. Drake
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190082682
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
To Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. Theseuniversity-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams andvisions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century,especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South.From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as "folk" practices, aiming to reform them and the broader South. Drawing on their correspondence, fieldnotes, and monographs,Drake shows that social scientists' use of "folk"reveals the religion was an important site for highlighting the supposed mental, moral, and cultural deficits of America's so-called folk population. Moreover, these social scientists did not just pioneer rural social science and reform but used theirstudy of religion to plant the seeds of the concept that would become known as the "culture of poverty" in the latter half of the twentieth century. To Know the Soul of a People is an exciting intellectual history that invites us to explore the knowledge that animated the earnest yet shortsightedliberal efforts to reform black and impoverished communities.

Local Complexities of Race in the Rural South

Local Complexities of Race in the Rural South PDF Author: Enrique Eugene Gildemeister
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description