Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas

5. Building Segregated Social Welfare: Texas’ Negro Division and Roosevelt’s New Deal

114 5 Building Segregated Social Welfare Texas’ Negro Division and Roosevelt’s New Deal  Negro Division staff had to work even harder during 1933 due to the increased expectations of New Deal programs. Though the division feared cutbacks as the southern economy staggered, federal funds from various sources helped increase the number of black and white agents. Black agents gained new responsibilities , more resources, and increased visibility as professionals. This helped them bolster the segregated division’s reputation and create a niche for themselves within the largest public welfare program undertaken in the United States to date. Their participation, however, indicated the entrenched nature of race-based decision making at the national and the state levels. Implementation did not challenge legalized racial discrimination. Instead, New Deal administrators relied on Negro Division staff to reach African Americans, thus perpetuating social separation of the races, and they allowed blacks only minimal roles in planning, administration, and implementation, thus perpetuating racial discrimination. White supervisors expected much of black agents, both male and female, and the black staff obliged in their ongoing effort to negotiate equity. Agents understood that New Deal programs offered select African Americans opportunities for relief long denied them by local and state officials. Black farmers who participated earned their place because of existing involvement in and connection with the TAEX’s Negro Division. Those who gained the division’s sponsorship had access to crop-reduction payments offered by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration or credit made available through the Farm Credit Act. National and state officials relied on Negro Division mediation to further these programs and others in Texas, including resettlement projects and mattress making. Despite efforts to reach black Texans, however, many did not secure much-needed relief. Farm families in the countryside that lived in counties building segregated social welfare 115 where white authority figures did not fund black county agents found themselves marginalized and virtually prohibited from participating, whether they qualified for relief or not. Most tenants and sharecroppers likewise found themselves excluded from New Deal relief because Negro agents tended not to serve propertyless farm families. Black agents found themselves caught between continuing to serve their existing clientele—generally, landowning farm families in relatively stable communities—and reaching out to new constituents, specifically, the landless, who had little support but that which national policies provided. Farmers, landed and landless alike, faced threats during the 1930s that exceeded those encountered previously. The debt cycle intensified as money supplies shrank during the inflationary 1920s and economically depressed 1930s. Natural forces, including drought and flood, destroyed crops, leaving farmers penniless and further indebted. Progressive farmers turned to machinery and synthetic chemicals to fight weeds and pests, and sharecroppers and tenants faced displacement as a result. Many tenants and sharecroppers had little choice but to abandon agriculture. The nonwhite farming population declined by approximately 30 percent across the South between 1930 and 1940. The drop was not as precipitous in Texas, as the number of Negro farm operators dropped only 21.3 percent. Ironically, as the number of farmers declined, the number of agents increased apace with the New Deal initiatives. Between 1930 and 1940, Negro Division staff doubled, a growth rate comparable to that enjoyed during the Great War. TAEX administrators as well as county commissioners supported the role of black staff in black communities, and this sustained funding matches at all levels. In 1930, 43 black agents served in counties throughout East Texas and reached 42,026 black Texans, at least 8.0 percent of the state’s rural black population (see Map 5). By 1932, when officials boasted that the TAEX was “the largest Extension Service in the United States and that means in the world,” 50 African American agents and supervisors worked in the Negro Division and accounted for one-sixth of the total number of black agents employed in the nation. More counties asked for agents than the TAEX could fund, even with federal monies available through the Capper-Ketchum Act (1928) and the Bankhead-Jones Act (1935). Federal appropriations funneled through New Deal agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration all increased involvement of African American Texans. By 1935, the Negro Division employed 5 supervisors, 33 agricultural 116 chapter 5 agents, and 29 home demonstration agents, who served residents in forty...