Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction

6. “The Lazarus of American Farmers”: The Politics of Black Agrarianism in the Jim Crow South, 1921–1938

6 “The Lazarus of American Farmers” The Politics of Black Agrarianism in the Jim Crow South, 1921–1938 Jarod Roll “Farmers skilled and trained at the calling” was the way a group of African American settlers in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma, described themselves in 1894. Claiming to be leaders of “that class of energetic, enthusiastic, frugal, industrious, and hard-working farming talent,” they had moved to Oklahoma “to populate and settle this vast, vacant, invaluable and productive soil.”1 Thirty years later, black farmers in that area and throughout the South would cast their allegiances almost exclusively with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an organization that believed, according to an editorial in its newspaper Negro World, “in the farmer and in ownership in the soil as the most independent life.”2 By the 1930s many of them would join the National Federation of Colored Farmers (NFCF), an organization that promoted land ownership, cooperative purchase and marketing schemes, and general economic independence among rural African Americans.3 “You farmers are producers,” the NFCF assured its members in 1933. “As such, you are constantly adding to the wealth of the nation . . . making America a better country, a richer country, a happier country.”4 Well after 1900, then, tens of thousands of African American farmers in the South shared and invested in a faith that farming offered a means to autonomy and prosperity, for individuals and for the commonwealth, whether defined as the United States or a black nation. Their ideas about the meaning and role of rural work—for individuals, for families, for communities, and ultimately for the race—defined the shape The Politics of Black Agrarianism in the Jim Crow South, 1921–1938 · 133 and direction of their politics in the first three and a half decades of the twentieth century. Recent scholarly explorations into the social, economic, and cultural aspects of rural black life after 1900 have provided a nuanced rejoinder to the narrow view that the history of African American farmers in the South was a “depressing story of degradation, poverty, and hopelessness for the men, women, and children who lived in desperation and without alternatives.”5 This essay builds on that new work by examining the political manifestations of black agrarianism in the period between the Great Migration and the Great Depression. Despite all of the limiting factors that confronted them, black farmers sustained well into the 1930s an idealized agrarian vision , rooted in the rural black movements of the late nineteenth century, which held sacred the right of small producers to independent livelihoods on the land they worked, a way of life that “shaped a core of common values of hard work, self-sufficiency, and mutual aid,” as historian Melissa Walker put it. This producerist belief system, shared in many respects by white farmers in this period, gave ideological structure to black farmers’ sense of individual and collective purpose that, in turn, linked the present and future to the past by means of “a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition.”6 According to the rural black version of this tradition, it was the faithful performance of productive labor, and the value of that production to the nation, that would enable African Americans to overcome the injustices that constrained their lives. Black farmers across the South, but particularly in the region’s western half, believed that if they worked hard enough they could become self-sufficient, purchase property, and ultimately free themselves from white interference. As was the case for many Americans, work legitimated citizenship and rights but it also promised the redemption of individuals and ultimately of the race from a history of oppression. Although this was a common belief, it was also an ideal one that only a small minority of black farmers ever actually achieved. Most remained landless and poor but nevertheless committed to the potential power of productive work on the land to transform their lives. As the way to either full American citizenship or an independent nation, an idealized black agrarianism fixed the imaginations of the majority—landowners and landless alike— and dominated rural black politics well into the 1930s as southern farmers threw support behind Garvey’s UNIA and later the NFCF. In the 1920s thousands of African Americans in the rural and small town South sought their future in the UNIA. Of the 1,176 UNIA divisions in 134 · Jarod Roll the world...