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41 3 Little Boy Blue 1930–1945 the seed of Bobby Bland’s dream was planted in a cotton field sixteen miles north of Memphis in the little farming village of Rosemark, Tennessee, where Robert Calvin Brooks and his twin brother Maurice were born on the evening of January 27, 1930. Their mother, Mary Lee Brooks, the former Mary Smith, was born in nearby Kerrville, the daughter of Wesley and Bernie Hardy Smith. She was only sixteen at the time of Robert’s birth, and his father, I. J. Brooks, a farmer, the son of Toney and Missouri Wright Brooks, originally from Dublin, Georgia, was eighteen. Mary Lee and I. J. had been married just a few months before in a hastily arranged ceremony on September 26, 1929.1 However, Mary Lee and her new twins stayed in Rosemark with her parents and seven siblings—Martha, 18; Josephine, 16; Beatrice, 14; Alphonse, 11; Blanche, 9; Dude, 7; and Nettie, 3—while the twins’ father remained as a lodger in the home of eighty-five-year-old Mary A. Burns and her son and cousin down the road in Kerrville.2 The stock market had crashed only a few months before, but rural Tennessee was already feeling the effects. Work for the Brooks family was becoming increasingly scarce, as cotton farming became mechanized with tractors replacing mule teams and horses and, of course, some back-breaking human labor, mostly by blacks. Many southern African Americans migrated north to take jobs in the factories and foundries of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other major American cities. Between 1920 and 1930, there was a net population loss from the South of 773,400 through migration,3 but, as the Depression deepened African Americans slowed their movement north, because employment for unskilled laborers was given first to the growing pool of unemployed whites. To many African Americans it was safer to take their chances in familiar places where family and church ties seemed more dependable than the unemployment lines in the cold North. Even some reverse migration occurred as blacks Little Boy Blue: 1930–1945 42 returned to the South when they could find no work or suitable housing. Northward migration was further discouraged by members of various organizations , like the Rural Industrial Association, which encouraged black farmers and sharecroppers to stay on the farm rather than to go north and compete for rapidly diminishing job opportunities.4 Kelly Miller expressed a common sentiment in a column in the September 18, 1931, issue of the Memphis World: “Give any Negro forty acres and a mule and he can succeed in raising a crop of cotton. There is no other industry in which the colored man is deemed indispensable unless he considers the comparatively small field of Pullman porter. In these two fields the black man is irreplaceable. . . . Notwithstanding the ugly face of things agricultural, the Negro’s future will be mainly found on the farm and largely in the cotton industry.”5 The Farm Security Administration was founded in 1937 by the federal government to provide low-interest loans to farm workers to help them start their own family-size farms. Indeed, over the next decade, 1930–40, net population loss through migration from the South decreased by more than half its previous level to 347,500.6 So, for the time being, the Brooks twins and their mother stayed put with Mary Lee’s family in Rosemark. The prospects in and around the town did not go much beyond the surrounding cotton fields, but perhaps they were better than elsewhere in these tough times. Even in Memphis, during the 1930s, bread lines stretched for blocks along Beale Street, “the number of black retail establishments declined from 378 to 318, attorneys from 8 to 5, and physicians from 86 to 46,” according to Roger Biles in his Memphis in the Great Depression: “With a leadership paralyzed by fear and subservient to a paternalistic ruling clique, the black community of Memphis wandered rudderless through the 1930s. Living conditions, never comfortable, worsened during the Great Depression, as unemployment, inadequate housing, and an unhealthy environment plagued the essentially helpless black masses. To be sure, some blacks avoided the relief rolls, and a handful of black-owned businesses survived the decade. But even for the more successful, living in the Bluff City meant segregation and second-class citizenship. The New Deal supplied a modicum of relief , but always under the watchful control of the resident machine—a machine imbued...

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