Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America

FOUR: Blacks in the Plantation South: Unique Homelands

c h a p t e r f o u r Blacks in the Plantation South Unique Homelands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles S. Aiken The future of American Negroes is in the South. Here they have made their contribution to American culture. . . . Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the Southern sun; and here, if anywhere on earth is the need of the thinker, the worker, and the dreamer. —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1947 During the civil rights era (1954–72), Jerry Lewis, a well-known comedian, appeared on the Jack Paar Show. Fumbling for humor, Lewis remarked that, every time he was on an airplane that flew over Mississippi, he made a special effort to flush the toilet. Lewis’s intent was to suggest that white Mississippians , as racial bigots, should be defecated on. Letters of protest poured into NBC’s New York headquarters and into affiliate stations from people who charged that the remark was slanderous to their state. To the chagrin of Lewis and NBC, much of the outcry over the remark was not from whites but from blacks ( Johnson 1996). Lewis was hardly the first or the last to assume what James Cobb observed to be the habit of “identifying Southern whites as ‘Southerners’ and Southern blacks as ‘blacks’” (Cobb 1996, 10). Some scholars of the South have unintentionally fallen into the same trap. Even the distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward appeared at times to for53 get blacks. To Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights workers, Woodward ’s Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) was a bible of the civil rights movement . But in another of Woodward’s books, The Burden of Southern History (1960), blacks can hardly identify with two of Woodward’s three ways in which the South’s history differs from that of the nation. Members of old southern white families might relate to his argument that the United States history of success, innocence, and economic abundance is not the history of the South, but southern black families view the interpretations from a different perspective . For blacks, the defeat of the Confederacy is a story of victory, not one of loss. Blacks were the victims of slavery and segregation, hardly the ones condemned to contend with its guilt. Only in poverty did the history of southern blacks and whites converge, but even there, what economic abundance was found in the South belonged far more to whites than to blacks. Much of the current argument over continuity in southern history and the South’s loss of distinctiveness and sectional identity is conducted from perspectives that are largely irrelevant to blacks. If blacks are remembered, even recognized as a central component of the South, it is often within the context of essentially passive roles. The omission of blacks is found especially in the prattle from the neo-Confederate right, which includes people who among other things fought to keep the Confederate States of America battle flag flying over the capitol buildings of Alabama and South Carolina and defend its attachment to the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi (“Civil Rights Memorial Shadowed by Rebel Flag” 1989; McAlister 1990; Auchmutey 1993). The spurning of blacks in definitions and discussions of the South and what is southern lends credence to repeated complaints by African Americans that they and their rich culture are largely oblivious to whites (Du Bois 1903, 181–82). The Plantation Regions as Homelands For most of their history in North America, blacks were a rural people largely confined to the southern plantation regions (map 4.1). At the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 percent of the nation’s blacks lived in the South, and 84 percent of them lived in rural areas, concentrated in the plantation regions. These regions, it should be emphasized, were not “homelands” to which blacks freely emigrated. As captives, blacks were torn from their African homes and 54 . . . charles s. aiken Map 4.1. Major historic and contemporary plantation regions, 2000. The black population ranged from 25 to more than 75 percent across these areas. Source: Based on Aiken 1998, 6. forcibly sold into the plantation areas as slaves. Even after the Civil War and emancipation, the migration of blacks from older plantation regions such as the Lower Piedmont to expanding plantation areas such as the alluvial Mississippi Valley was largely manipulated by white planters who needed inexpensive black...