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246 Chapter Nine Attempted Revolt of the Rednecks The corrupt political and economic system imposed on Mississippi by the Bourbons produced indescribable suffering for the vast majority of the state’s people.Conditions in the state were so bad that northern life insurance companies refused to write policies for Mississippians, and some required their northern policyholders to get permission to visit the state in order to maintain their coverage. Pellagra, a disease caused by inadequate diets, weakened a significant portion of the population who were restricted to eating fatback, corn bread, and molasses by the sharecropping system. Denied opportunities for education,the population endured the nation’s highest illiteracy rates, with the black majority’s rate approaching 50 percent.The restive white small farmers seethed with resentment against the oligarchy that controlled their lives and ignored their clamor for change.When the hoped-for relief did not appear in a political system little altered by the 1890 constitution, farmers forced the adoption of the all-white primary for the Democratic Party and turned to two demagogues—James K.Vardaman and Theodore G. Bilbo—to reform the political system.Their elections demonstrated the wide class divisions between the white farmers and the Bourbons and gave poor whites hope. The farmers’“saviors”proved to be flawed individuals, and the reforms they generated fell short of producing the miracles dreamed of by their followers .Yet change did begin. For example, the legislature in 1908 authorized the establishment of agricultural high schools, regional institutions that enabled rural students to continue beyond elementary education. Two years later the legislature established a normal school at Hattiesburg to improve the quality of teachers in the state. Progress came slowly, but unseating the Bourbons began to make a difference. To understand where Mississippi stood at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries,consider Matt Brown,who worked as a sharecropper near Black Hawk, Mississippi, from 1884 until he died in 1905. He bought his goods from the “Jones store,” and we have the store’s 247 Attempted Revolt of the Rednecks | books detailing his expenditures and debts. Brown was black and owned next to nothing, selling his labor for the credit advanced to him by the Jones store. When he settled with the store at the end of each year, he owed on average $450. In 1892 he began the year obligated to $226.84 and ended owing $452.41. During the year, he earned credits from the sale of his cotton , cutting wood, clearing land for others, and hauling goods for the store, accumulating credit amounting to $171.12, but he bought $54.45 more than he earned. He spent $35.15 for food, $29.45 for clothing, $173.64 for farming expenses, $.55 for drugs, and $112.81 for miscellaneous items, including $9.75 for chewing tobacco and snuff. He also borrowed $4.00 cash. Four years later Brown brought forward a debt of $387.16. During the year, he purchased food worth $8.42, clothing costing $27.25, farm and household supplies amounting to $38.30, drugs for $.95, and miscellaneous items totaling $12.08. And he borrowed $2.35. That year his cotton sold for enough to clear his accumulated debts, leaving a credit of $58.76, but he slipped back into debt. The last charge in 1905 was for a coffin and burial supplies. The storekeeper marked off the remainder owed, indicating that Brown escaped the cycle only by dying. Detailsof exactlyhowplantersandstorekeeperskeptfarmersinpeonage were understandably not well documented because of the fraud and usury involved in the transactions, but the investigation of Italian immigrants’ Sharecroppers came to make up the overwhelming majority of the state’s population, and declining cotton prices drove them deeper into poverty, lowering their standard of living to a nadir of disease and ignorance in the twentieth century. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from the Allen (Leigh Briscoe) Collection. 37.171.121] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 08:48 GMT) 248 | Attempted Revolt of the Rednecks complaints by the U.S. attorney general’s office provided a glimpse into some of the methods used by planters. In 1907, 180 Italian families worked on cotton plantations in the Delta region. Leroy Percy and other large planters violated the federal alien contract labor law to import the Italians with the idea that they might be able to replace their overwhelmingly black labor force with immigrants. The planters sent tickets for ship transport to...

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