American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (review)

After investigating the massacre of hundreds of African Americans in Elaine, Arkansas in 1921, William Pickens, a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), dubbed the Mississippi River Valley, which included the town of Elaine, the “Congo of America.” Pickens recognized that the brutal treatment that African American laborers suffered at the hands of whites in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta was on par with the ruthless treatment Congolese laborers endured under Belgian King Leopold II in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian Nan Woodruff uses this observation as her entry point into the world of labor and race relations in the Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. For Woodruff, however, the comparison between the Delta and the Congo extends beyond violence against people of color. The Delta and the Congo warrant close association, she argues, because colonial economic systems and political structures shaped labor and race relations in both places. Thus, while her primary aim is to shine new light on the depth and breadth of planter control in the Delta, and on the nature of African American resistance to it, she also seeks to locate the Delta in a broader colonial context.

Woodruff begins her study by exploring the origin of the alluvial empire, which is the name turn-of-the-century capitalists gave the Mississippi River Valley. She points out that the same formula that enabled western colonial expansion—foreign capital plus extractive agricultural industries plus coerced labor—gave rise in the Delta to a totalitarian regime controlled by a handful of wealthy hardwood and cotton plantation businessmen. As a result, the alluvial empire, by World War I, mirrored western colonial empires.

It is widely known that America’s entry into the First World War exacerbated tension between labor and capital in the South. Woodruff adds to this understanding with an insightful analysis of the ways African Americans in the Delta took advantage of war related economic opportunities to increase their quality of life. She includes in this analysis a noteworthy treatment of African American resistance that makes clear how newly established branches of the NAACP provided African Americans in the Delta with alternative sources of political information that enabled them to escape isolation; NAACP branches also provided local people with new weapons with which to challenge white power.

African American resistance to white power prompted plantation owners to resort to extreme violence to preserve the status quo. In Woodruff’s look at the Elaine Massacre, one of the country’s worst episodes of post war racial terrorism, she ably demonstrates how deeply whites feared African American prosperity and how little they feared federal intervention. Also, in discussing the spark that ignited the massacre, she makes the important point that understanding the form and function of early black political activism requires careful consideration of African American social institutions, particularly Masonic orders. In addition, she draws much needed attention to the deeply rooted tradition of African American armed self-defense.

In her chapter on rural black political culture during the 1920s Woodruff does a terrific job of using letters sent by local people to the NAACP to show the extent of black political awareness in the Delta. At the same time, she makes clear that everyday beatings, humiliations, and murders had a greater impact on African American political behavior than incidents like the Elaine Massacre. Her observation is an important reminder that historians have to look beyond the dramatic and sensational to the routine and seemingly mundane if they want to understand the political behavior of ordinary people.

In examining the Delta during the Depression, Woodruff notes that New Deal agricultural policies not only saved the plantation economy, but also allowed planters to legitimize their exploitative labor practices. In weighing the African American response to the discriminatory administration of New Deal programs, Woodruff focuses on the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU). She includes here an important...