The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War by Charles S. Aiken (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, November 1998, pp. 180-187 REVIEWS The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil W ar. Charles S. Aiken. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1998. 452 pp., maps, photos, figs., bibliography, index. $45.00 hardcover (ISBN 0-8018-5679-5). JohnJ. Winberry Charles Aiken has studied the South and the plantation intensely for more than 30 years, and his research, typified by insight, sensitivity to place, and thoroughness of argument, has provided us a better understanding of the region. This book is no exception. It is well written, thoroughly researched (using documents in 45 public and private archival collections and well over 600 secondary sources), profusely illustrated (some 130 maps, figures, and photographs, many from the Farm Security Administration Archives), and cogently argued (supported by more than 800 cita­ tions and explanatory endnotes). While the cores of some chapters are based on already published work, the book format gives Aiken a larger canvas on which to develop his ideas about the plantation South and present new research. The author focuses on two themes: (1) the changes in the plantation from 1865 to 1970, particularly the spatial and landscape expressions of the institution and (2) the relationship between African Americans and the plantation during that period and especially since 1970, a date that approximates the end of their direct involvement with the plantation economy. Aiken emphasizes that the plantation dif­ fers across the South and uses the Lower Piedmont of Georgia, the Black Belt of Alabama, and the Yazoo Delta of northwestern Mississippi as case study areas. While the former two locations have witnessed the economic demise of the institu­ tion (but not of the plantation society), the plantation economy continues to thrive in the Yazoo Delta as the neoplantation. The book is divided into three parts following these themes. The first is based on Aiken’s and Merle Prunty’s seminal work. It defines the plantation, maps its dis­ tribution, and discusses the changes associated with the transition from the Old South Plantation (1600s-1865) to the New South Plantation (1880-1940) to the Modem South Neoplantation (since 1970). Aiken also extends his analysis to the towns, which were tied to the 19th/20th-century plantation economy because of their furnish merchants, processing facilities, and transportation centers. He argues that the plantation declined during the New South era as planters sought new opportunities in the region's towns and cities, resulting in a general ero­ sion of leadership in the rural areas. But Aiken does not delve deeply into the causes of this, and one wonders, for instance, about the effect of the disproportionate Dr. Winberry is Professor o f Geography at the University o f South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208. VOL. XXX VIII, No. 2 181 number of Confederate officers killed in action on the vacuum of leadership in post­ war political and economic affairs. Aiken concludes this first part by discussing the complex issue of mechanization and tenant displacement and presenting a sensitive, perceptive, and haunting chapter on the psychic and proxemic geography of African Americans in the segregated South. The second part treats the civil rights movement and begins by mapping the South of Compliance, the Wait-and-See South, and the South of Total Resistance. It traces the history of civil rights in the South from 1954 (the Brown v Board of Edu­ cation Supreme Court decision that overturned the concept of separate but equal) to the present. Aiken approaches this period systematically, describing the evolution of the movement in the South and the White resistance to it by focusing separately on voting rights, local development and the war on poverty, and the desegregation of schools. It is carefully researched, well argued, and straightforward in the assess­ ment of goals, tactics, and results. The third part provides a specifically geographic dimension to the civil rights movement and its aftermath through landscape and spatial analysis. It discusses the political geography of the Voting Rights Act and the recent court decisions that invalidated the congressional districts originally drawn to create African American majorities, an issue that likely will carry over into the next reapportionment. Based on recent research, Aiken also shows...