Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction
Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction
Cite
Abstract
Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule focuses on America's most-forgotten farmers: black families that cast their lot on their own land and depended on their own labor in a nation that doubted their right to control either. Rural African Americans have long been perceived as dependent tenants, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers. This collection of essays indicates that one in four black farm families overcame numerous obstacles by 1920 to own farm land. It does this without diminishing the serious nature of the opposition that limited their right to property and independent decision making. These essays indicate that black farmers who became farm owners and landowners should not be dismissed as anomalous economic success stories. Instead, they should be evaluated within the context of a larger social historical milieu. White landowners attempted to protect white's privileged status within the American agrarian ideal that linked landownership to morality and full citizenship. Black farm families had to overcome this philosophical barrier and additional obstacles posed by racism and sexism, the crop lien system of labor, debt, and unstable markets. Additional factors such as geographic isolation, limited crop and stock choices, mechanization, personal relationships, and kinship networks all affected black farm families in numerous and inconsistent ways. Beyond Forty Acres encourages readers to re-conceptualize small farms not as failure when compared to large-scale production agriculture but as an alternative approach specific to a time and place.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
Debra A. Reid
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I Historiography and Philosophy
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II Farm Acquisition and Retention
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III Agrarianism and Black Politics
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IV Farm Families at Work
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7
Land Ownership and the Color Line: African American Farmers in the Heartland, 1870s–1920s
Debra A. Reid
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8
Of the Quest of the Golden Leaf: Black Farmers and Bright Tobacco in the Piedmont South
Evan P. Bennett
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9
“Justifiable Pride”: Negotiation and Collaboration in Florida African American Extension
Kelly A. Minor
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7
Land Ownership and the Color Line: African American Farmers in the Heartland, 1870s–1920s
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V Legal Activism and Civil Rights Expansion
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10
Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt to the 1970s
Veronica L. Womack
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11
“You're just like mules, you don't know your own strength”: Rural South Carolina Blacks and the Emergence of the Civil Rights Struggle
Carmen V. Harris
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12
Between Forty Acres and A Class Action Lawsuit: Black Farmers, Civil Rights, and Protest against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1997–2010
Valerie Grim
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Researching African American Land and Farm Owners: A Bibliographic Essay
Debra A. Reid
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10
Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt to the 1970s
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End Matter
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