Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

For those of you who have followed me on these pages, you know of my interest in African American farmers and their families.  No, I am not a farmer, and, no, I am not African American. Why, you might ask, do you work in this area?  The short verse is that I work in this area because their stories of struggle and resilience when fighting against the USDA and the DOJ are painful to watch, difficult to grasp, and inspiring to see.  Once I began to hear their stories in 1994, their words, expressions, challenges, and pain served to transform the way I see things in the world and the way I try to live my life.

You may have seen an article or two that I've written such as the one co-authored by Edward Robinson, “We Didn’t Get Nothing:” The Plight of Black Farmers, or the most recent one, Land Gains, Land Losses: The Odyssey of African Americans Since Reconstruction. In those articles you would find information about how freed people came to own land, and some even before Freedom, and how against all odds, they became prodigious land owners, coming to own land even faster than white people at the time. There were enormous road blocks toward buying land and then there were enormous road blocks with keeping the land. Two major challenges of land ownership historically have been the heir property challenges, and then for farmers who choose to work with the USDA, the "lender of last resorts," there have been other challenges with keeping the land. It is amazing how people in positions of power can make a decision to do nothing, decide to change the farm/home plan, deny, postpone, foreclose of farmers needlessly, fail to offer disaster relief when white farmers are getting it, fail to offer other services when white farmers are offered the services, and other egregious acts of discrimination.

All of that became more apparent upon reading
Dr. Henry Louis Gates' latest volume, Stony the

Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow," released just this year.  The book is a heavy read in places, a painful read in other places, and a smooth, narrative read in still other places. Rather than recount the history of Reconstruction, he goes about exploring the social and intellectual history of a sordid time in American history. White people and white institutions used a plethora of strategies to regain from African Americans all that they had prior to Freedom and Reconstruction. White Supremacy led whites down the road of using "science" to prove that Blacks were less than whites, that they come from different species, and that they could never handle leadership, responsibility, and the obligations of the vote.

Whites used literature and art to characterize and vilify a people who had just a few years prior earned their freedom. Each chapter has its own images that are discussed in each chapter. They are hard to see, images from mocking a people's individual and collective physical appearance via pejorative characterizations, comparison of brain sizes for whites versus Blacks, or images of alligators hunters using Black children for bait, and other egregious types of images.

Once African Americans fully grasped what the white world was attempting to do, a movement toward developing the "New Negro" set in or even the "New New Negro." These were attempts by Black artists, authors, business people, land owners, and others to develop more appropriate images in keeping with how Blacks really looked and lived rather than white supremacy's characterizations.

Of note is the Harlem Renaissance, a short-lived time in Harlem where Black artists, musicians, and writers converged around developing the "New Negro." A curiosity is that some did not consider the blues or jazz to typify this time and intentions.

Under girding it all was the machinations of white supremacy.  Reconstruction for the white world was that of Redemption from the Lost Cause.  State Senates and Houses of Representatives which were led by way too many people of color, those seats and states had to be regained. After all, how could a freed Black person be expected to live and represent an entire state even when that state had a minority of White people? While it is true that a minority of freed people could read since it was against the law to learn how to read and write during slavery, it was an overstatement that freed people had no abilities to lead the county or state in which they resided.

So, as stereotypes fostered fear and incompetence and all manner of other things, all at a societal level for freed persons, the same phenomena played out in the world of farming while Black. The peak of Black land ownership was 1910, and from that time until now, African Americans have lost land at a higher pace that white farmers.  "Maybe they are just bad farmers," I have heard white people say.  No, they were good farmers. They had worked the land during slavery.  They knew how to farm. As some have said, "It is in my DNA." Or, another said, "My blood is on this land." Or as a farmer's wife said in our documentary recently, African Americans were intended to work the land but never to own the land.

In my writings, I assert that African American farmers have lost much of their land to heir property problems, a problem that exists when a distant cousin in another state with no attachment to the land sells his or her portion at an elevated price, forcing the entire land to be sold to the highest bidder. Secondly, I assert that machinations of the USDA with its tentacles into farming at the local level via the FSA work to disenfranchise Black farmers.  The law is color blind but people are not.  The county committee system is the best of democracy and the worst of democracy.

For those who want to feel challenged, read Gates' book and then read my two articles and place them alongside each other. It would be a painful learning journey, but one that America needs to take. White America would do well to learn what our Black sisters and brothers experienced then and now.  Frankly, Black land loss at the hands of discriminating folks did not end with Reconstruction. It is going on now.  That's a post for another day.