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

10. Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt to the 1970s

10 Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt to the 1970s Veronica L. Womack The Black Belt includes most of five Old South states, South Carolina, Georgia , Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In 1900 nearly one-half of the entire U.S. African American population lived in this area. A concentration on one of these states, Alabama, and an analysis of African American farmer demographics in Black Belt counties in the state, can help explain the relationship between cash-crop agriculture, African American land tenancy, and political activism between the 1930s and the 1970s. An exploitive labor system emerged in Alabama, as it did across the Cotton South, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. In tandem with sharecropping and the crop lien emerged black separatist movements that allowed black farmers to cluster in insulated farming communities. Separatism is relative in the Black Belt, where African Americans constituted 45 to 60 percent of the population and black farmers operated between 35 and 60 percent of all farms. Nonetheless, varying strategies of Black Power developed, grounded in agricultural pursuits and tenuous connections to the land. This work argues that black farmers cultivated a unique rural Black Nationalist ideology during the 1930s; a predecessor to Black Power activities within the state. Lower class, rural blacks expanded this ideology during the 1960s as Black Muslims acquired property.1 Hasan Jeffries posits that the root of contemporary Black Power can be found in rural Alabama, and that it emerged during the 1960s through the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Yet the components of the ideology of contemporary Black Power emerged even earlier in rural Alabama, during the 1930s, and through the work 232 · Veronica L. Womack of the Share Croppers’ Union of Alabama (SCU), in connection with the Communist Party. SNCC’s work helped the ideology mature. A rural Black Nationalist ideology existed in the context of agricultural activities and processes that had traditionally been associated with socioeconomic and political advancement, independence, and a distinctive and separatist black identity. Black Nationalism in rural Alabama preceded Black Power in the Black Belt but was a key influencing factor in developing its unique rural character. Black Power expressed itself in the Alabama Black Belt through land acquisition and ownership, labor negotiations, and political participation with the goal of dealing with racial hostility. Circumstances created distinctive Black Nationalism that helped shape Black Power in Alabama.2 The Black Belt is a crescent-shaped region that includes 623 counties in eleven states from eastern Texas to the eastern shore of Virginia and constitutes the bulk of the old plantation South. The term gained some visibility after Reconstruction when the New York Times reported on “Alabama ’s ‘Black Belt’: A Region Where Colored Men Are Contented and Prosperous.” Booker T. Washington emphasized factors that undermined the idea of a contented and prosperous black population in 1901 when he made connections between the rich black soil, majority African American population, history of enslavement, and extreme racial politics often perpetrated through violent attacks on blacks. He observed this firsthand from Tuskegee Institute in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the region because of its biracial demographic, cash crop agriculture, extreme and persistent poverty, low education levels, poor quality of health, and high economic dependence. It has also gained attention because of its checkered history of civil rights infractions and activism. Some of the activism can be traced as far back as the post–Civil War agricultural pursuits of African Americans that linked the Republican Party and African American agricultural workers in the Alabama Black Belt, including the political and self-defense activities of the Union League in Alabama.3 A unique form of Black Power developed out of black farmers’ contradictory relationships to the Alabama soil. Black farmers in the area experienced some of the highest rates of tenancy and lowest rates of land ownership in the United States during the early twentieth century. This sets the context for considering theories related to Black Power. According to Walton and Smith, power is analyzed in terms of (1) its base, (2) its exercise , and (3) the skill of its exercise in particular circumstances, situations, or contexts. Black Power as an ideology is as adaptable and varied as the Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt to the 1970s · 233 experiences, geographies, and socioeconomic and political circumstances of people of African...