Black farmers

“ The cotton crop of this country is being raised to such an extent by the small white farmers that the large planter can no longer afford to hire and compete with that class of labor who only expend their own energy; consequently the tendency is to make farmers of the negroes. ”

“ The land property in the hands of the white American exploiters constitutes the most important material basis of the entire system of national oppression and serfdom of the Negroes in the Black Belt. More than three-quarters of all Negro farmers here are bound in actual serfdom to the farms and plantations of the white exploiters by the feudal system of 'share cropping'. ”

“ We prefer, however, the tenant system. We wish to make small farmers our laborers, and bring them up as nearly as possible to the standard of the small white farmers. But this can only be done gradually, because the larger portion of the negroes are without any personal property. We could not afford to sell the mules, implements, &c., where a laborer has nothing. Therefore the first year we contract to work with him on the half-share system, and require him to plant a portion of the land he cultivates in corn, hay, potatoes, &c. ”

“ The great mass of Negroes in the South either rent the lands or work them on shares. This rent varies according to the kind of crops that are made. If the tenant makes a good crop this year, he must expect to pay more rent the next year, or his farm will be rented to another at higher figures. Of course, the Negroes are ignorant and are unable to keep their own accounts. Sometimes these Negro farmers pay as much [Pg xv] as 50%, 75% and 100% on the goods and provisions which they consume during the year. ”

“ This method of renting lands and selling goods according to the condition of the crops, is repeated year after year. I know ignorant farmers who have been working under these conditions for twenty-five and thirty years, who have never been able to get more than $15 or $20 in any one year during this period. These are not worthless and shiftless Negroes, but persons who work hard from Monday morning until Saturday night. As a rule, they are on their farms at sunrise, and remain there until sunset. They have their dinners brought to them in the fields. ”

“ They furnished a million farm laborers, 80,000 farmers, 22,000 teachers, 600,000 servants and washerwomen, and 50,000 in trades and merchandizing. In 1920, 38.9% of colored women were at work as contrasted with 17.2% of native white women. Of the colored women 39% were farming and 50% in service. ”

“ Q. How as to their material prosperity and thrift and saving?
—A. It varies very much. For instance, take the State of Georgia—and I believe it is admitted that Georgia is one of the most thrifty and prosperous of all the Southern States—I think the small farmers are generally self-sustaining; they raise their own supplies.
Q. Do these small white farmers employ negro help to any extent?
—A. To a certain extent. If a man has more land than his family can work he will hire a negro laborer. ”

“ It is my belief that the order of the Secretary which the Court strikes down was set up in faithful adherence to the Act's purpose to raise the prices that farmers receive for their products and that the Court's action will tend to have precisely the opposite effect of depressing those prices. I have no doubt but that the Court's decision will enable some handlers to reap greater profits but I regret to say that this is bound to be at the expense of the farmers themselves-for whose benefit the national program was primarily passed. ”

“ As the nation developed this slave labor became confined more and more to the raising of cotton, although sugar continued to be the chief crop in the West Indies and Louisiana, and rice on the southeast coast and tobacco in Virginia. This world importance of cotton brought an economic crisis: Rich land in America, adapted to slave methods of culture, was becoming limited, and must either be increased or slavery would die an economic death. On the other hand, beside the plantation hands, there had grown up a large class of Negro servants and laborers who were distributed both north and south. ”

“ In order to bring an end to this competition which was pushing farmers to the wall, the 1935 Act gave the Secretary specific power to set up regional marketing areas within which he could, for the Government, fix minimum prices handlers would have to pay to farmers for the various uses of milk, require that those minimum prices be paid to a pool for the area and distribute the proceeds of the pool so that each farmer selling milk through the pool would ultimately be paid at the same uniform rate or 'blend price' regardless of the use to which his particular milk was put. ”

“ I think that if the Court really does believe that the Secretary has any power at all to prevent pool farmers from being subjected to discriminatory competition from outside 'free riders' it should state in clear and precise terms what those powers are and inform the Secretary how he can meet this Court's requirements. ”

“ The fact that a very large proportion of the farms are so limited in size as to amount only to gardens, or, in negro parlance, “patches,” augurs well rather than ill, for it means many small proprietors instead of merely a few large ones and the rest all renters or day laborers. Since out of 369,265 black people in the state ten years of age or over who are engaged in gainful occupations, almost two-thirds are employed in some line of agricultural work, is it not well that the million acres owned by negroes should be distributed in small holdings? ”

“ These waste places can be reclaimed and the guttered hills made to blossom, only by giving the Negro a common education combined with religious, moral and industrial training and the opportunity to at least [Pg xvii] own his home, if not the land he cultivates. The Negro must be taught to believe that the farmer can become prosperous and independent; that he can own his home and educate his children in the country. If he can, and he can be taught these things, in less than ten years, every available farm in the rural South will be occupied. ”

“ Practically, all the land in the black belt of the South is cultivated by Negroes and the farm production has decreased so rapidly during the last ten or fifteen years that the average Negro farmer hardly makes sufficient to pay his rent and buy the few necessaries of life. ”

“ Whether wages are high or low, the negro laborer is likely at any time to leave his employment, with resulting embarrassment to the employer. Hence, it is a common practice to let small holdings to negroes, in order that interest in the crop may diminish their migratory tendencies. According to the census of 1890, 549,642 ‘farms’ were occupied by negroes, of which only 22 per cent. were owned by their occupants. The tenant farmers sometimes pay a cash rental, but more frequently farm ‘on shares.’ The landowner furnishes machinery and draught animals, receiving one-half the crop. ”

“ Those, at any rate, who thought that we were entitled to some breathing space, were willing to concede certain little "reserves" in the centre of groups of white men's farms, into which black men and women could be herded like so many heads of cattle, rearing their offspring as best they could and preparing them for a life of serfdom on the surrounding farm properties. ”

“ There is no doubt that the Negro as a tenant farmer is a failure; this we are forced to admit, but we do so with a justly proud feeling that it is not an inherent race characteristic, but the result of conditions over which we had little or no control. Failure is inevitably and indelibly stamped in the foreheads of any class of average tenant farmers, regardless of race or color.
In American agriculture the Negro has always held, and is yet holding, an important place ”

“ That is to say, white ownership farming barely suffices to raise black labor to the level of the efficiency of white tenants.
I am concerned with the negro only in his bearing upon the present condition of southern agriculture, and do not intend the dark pictures I have drawn of his shortcomings as 'views' upon the race question. The best element of our colored people merit sincere praise for their progress; but it can not be denied that the great mass of the negro population, in its present condition, is a fearful incubus upon the industry of the south. ”

“ There are no women working in the fields, their time being spent about the house and the garden. The system of crop liens is unknown. Each farmer raises his own supplies, smokes his own meat or buys at the store for cash or on credit. Wheat and corn are ground in local mills. The heavy interest charges of other districts are thus avoided. It is stated that a great number of the Negroes are buying little places, and this bears out the census figures, which show that of the Negro farmers 90.9 per cent in this county are owners or managers; the average for the negroes as a whole is 27.1 per cent. ”

“ Kelsey points out a curious misconception in the census summary, wherein the inference is drawn that negroes are better farmers than whites because they raise larger crops. “No wonder the negroes’ crops are larger,” when the whites farm the hill country and the negroes till the delta, which “will raise twice as much cotton per acre as the hills.” Furthermore the negro, whether tenant or owner, is under the close supervision of a white landlord or creditor, who in self-protection keeps control of him, whereas the white farmer is left to succeed or fail without expert guidance. ”

“ He gives it four-fifths of his land; while his white rival allows it only a quarter of his, less by half than the area he gives to live-stock, dairying, hay and grains. At Sunnyside, on the west bank of the Mississippi, negro tenant farmers have been practically forced out of business by Italians, who produced in 1899–1904 more than twice as much lint cotton per working hand, and 70% more per acre. The general place of the negro in agriculture is shown also by the fact that more than four-fifths of the farm acreage and farm values of the state are in the hands of the whites. ”

“ This may be true of the whites, but it is a lame explanation for the blacks. Negro farmers who own more land than they can cultivate appear to be better known at Washington than they are locally. The trouble with the entire argument is that it assumes that the Negro is an independent cultivator of cotton. This is not quite the case. In all parts of the South the Negro, tenant or owner, usually receives advances from white factors, and these spend a good part of their time riding about to see that the land is cultivated in order to insure repayment of their loans. ”

“ Industry is competing with agriculture for the limited supply of Negro workers. Negroes, responding to exactly the same natural laws that control the white farmers, have been moving cityward, entering other occupations, migrating west or north—where more money is to be made. Agricultural wages have therefore gone up and rents, relatively, have gone down, and had the South not been blessed for several years with wonderful returns from its monopoly crop, there might have been a more serious crisis. ”

“ In the ante-bellum South, likewise, it was the planters, and necessarily so, who introduced the new staples of sea-island cotton and sugar, the new devices of horizontal plowing and hillside terracing, the new practice of seed selection, and the new resource of commercial fertilizers. Yet their constant bondage to the staples debarred the whole community in large degree from agricultural diversification, and their dependence upon gangs of negro slaves kept the average of skill and assiduity at a low level. ”

“ So long as the land is new and rich, and produces corn and sweet potatoes abundantly, the black people seldom suffer greatly for food; but, when the ground is all cleared, and planted in rice or cotton, corn and potatoes become scarce; and when corn has to be bought on a cotton plantation, the people must expect to make acquaintance with hunger.
My grandfather was brought from Africa, and sold as a slave in Calvert county, in Maryland, about the year 1730. ”

“ To the same shortage was owing such opportunity as the white yeomanry had in staple production. The world offered a market, though not at high prices, for a greater volume of the crops than the plantation slaves could furnish; the farmers supplied the deficit.
Free workingmen in general, whether farmers, artisans or unskilled wage earners, merely filled the interstices in and about the slave plantations. One year in the eighteen-forties a planter near New Orleans, attempting to dispense with slave labor, assembled a force of about a hundred Irish and German immigrants for his crop routine. ”

“ Of course, a large percentage will remain in the industrial centers of the North, but the negro’s love for his folks [Pg 2] and for the soil will influence many to begin payments on farms at a time when wages are high and when such crops as cotton, tobacco, and peanuts are bringing good prices. Negroes, as a rule, know how to grow the cash crops, and it has been found in many sections that negroes succeed with poultry, truck, dairying, and other diversified interests when they own their own small farms. ”

“ Agriculture is, or has been, the basic industry of nearly every race or nation that has succeeded. The Negro got a knowledge of this during slavery. Hence, in a large measure, he is in possession of this industry in the South to-day. The Negro can buy land in the South, as a rule, wherever the white man can buy it, and at very low prices. Now, since the bulk of our people already have a foundation in agriculture, they are at their best when living in the country, engaged in agricultural pursuits. ”