The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms (review)

The Bottom Rung counterposes two theories of the rise of the current conditions of the African American family: a cultural and an adaptation theory. The long-held cultural view holds that the matricentric features now common among African Americans were normalized in the plantation system of Southern agriculture and transplanted bo the North by migrants from the South. Tolnay rejects the cultural thesis in favor of an adaptation view that the social-economic conditions of making a living carry incentives and disincentives for family building. The book examines these two competing theories. Tolnay reasons that, according to the cultural thesis, matricentric family features should be (1) more evident among African American farm families than Northern nonfarm families, (2) more evident in earlier periods of historically closer to slavery than in later periods, and (3) more evident among recent Southern farm migrants to the North than among Northern urban residents. To test his adaptation thesis, Tolnay hypothesizes that the Black farm family closely resembles the white farm family but differs from nonfarm families in the South and in the North.

Tolnay assembles an impressive variety of data from public records, earlier studies on the South and on African Americans, and censuses, including public-use microdata samples for 1910 and 1940. He uses the microdata to compare family demographics for the two dates, the 30 years between which mark the pivotal period during which sharecropping reigned and its demise got underway.

The Bottom Rung situates the African American farmer within the context of racial segregation in the South and the structure of Southern agriculture as it evolved from the end of slavery through the first four decades of the twentieth century. African American farmers were concentrated in Black Belt counties, where the plantation system organized the local economy with cotton as its cash crop. Tenancy organized production, and share croppers’ families provided the labor. In share cropping, the owner supplied the land, technical resources (see, fertilizer, mules, plows, and other tools), housing and land for a garden, and the cropper supplied the labor in exchange for one-half or another fraction of the profits of the cash crop. Croppers’ farms were small, around 50 acres. White croppers outnumbered African Americans, though sharecropping was more prevalent among African American than white farmers.

A farm, like any other production unit, needs a dependable work force. Marriage, family stability, size of household, fertility, and living arrangements of children met that need for the cropper farm family. Tolnay’s comparisons of African American and white farmers’ family demographics reveal striking similarities, with the races largely indistinguishable in family structure in 1910 and in 1940. The most noticeable racial exception among the farm families was the living arrangements of children. In 1910, around 20 percent of Black children under the age of 14, compared with slightly under 10 percent of white farm children, did not live with both parents. Tolnay reasons that this racial difference should not be interpreted as evidence for the survival of a cultural norm from slavery of female-headedness, because in 1940, 30 additional years past the end of slavery, “Blacks’ likelihood of living in a disrupted family rose by 16 percent,” an increase “dwarfed by the corresponding 43 percent increase in the North.”

In contrast to the racial similarities among farm families were the regional and occupational differences among African Americans. Among Northern nonfarm African Americans, marriage was far less prevalent than among Southern farm men and women; separations were more prevalent; completed fertility was lower; and school attendance was higher, as was children’s living apart from both parents. The within race comparisons of Southern farm and Northern and Southern nonfarm families elaborate and give solid evidence of the effects of ways of making a living on family demographics.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Southern farming had undergone a major technological revolution that drastically cut labor needs. Farmers in the South had almost doubles in number...