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African American History Agriculture Through most of American history, agriculture was the primary occupation of African Americans. It was only after World War II that African Americans joined the general shift of laborers away from agriculture. African Americans have deep historical ties to agriculture. During the centuries of slavery, tending crops was the primary economic activity of enslaved African Americans. Along the South Atlantic Coast in colonial North America and in the young United States, tobacco depended heavily on slave labor. Later, rice, grown in parts of South Carolina and other states, and sugar cane, grown chiefly in Louisiana, became important cash crops grown by slaves. With the development of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century, cotton became the most profitable agricultural export of the United States. After the Civil War and emancipation, African Americans remained heavily involved in agriculture, particularly in the South. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, African American involvement in farmwork dropped dramatically, so that only a tiny proportion of African Americans were involved in agricultural labor as the twenty-first century began. While nearly two-thirds of African American workers were engaged in agricultural labor in 1870, only about 1 percent worked in agriculture in 2000. Black Farmers After Slavery After slavery ended in 1865, most African Americans still lived in the rural South, where farming remained the most important occupation. In order to farm, however, workers needed land, tools, farm animals, and seeds and other supplies. As a result, most African Americans farmed on white-owned land through tenant, sharecropper, and crop-lien systems. Tenant farmers rented their plots of land for fixed sums--in money or the equivalent in crops. Under the sharecropping system, the farmers borrowed fertilizer, tools, seeds, and other necessities from landowners. They then paid off their debts, with interest, by giving the landowners shares of their crops. Since the landowners often charged high rates of interest and were also the primary keepers of business records, sharecroppers frequently fell steadily deeper into debt with each harvest. The crop-lien system gave merchants and landlords who provided supplies to farmers mortgages on the crops that the farmers promised to produce. Again, high interest rates gave the advantage to the lenders and contributed to keeping most black farmers in perpetual debt and poverty. At the same time, concentration on the planting of cotton, encouraged by white landowners, further hampered black farmers in the South. Overproduction of cotton led to a drastic drop in cotton prices during the second half of the nineteenth century. Some scholars have estimated that by 1890, nine out of ten African American farmers were sharecroppers. Despite the many handicaps that African Americans face and widespread white southern opposition to their owning land, a substantial minority of African Americans did manage to acquire their own land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1886, African American farmers joined together to form a mutual-support organization, the Colored Farmers' Alliance, modeled on the white Farmers' Alliance founded two years earlier. This cooperative endeavor supported its members and aided in the progress of independent African American farms. Meanwhile, the founding of black-owned banks and other financial institutions helped in their efforts. About fifty black-owned lending institutions were founded between 1880 and 1911. By 1910, around 200,000 African American families had managed to obtain their own farmland. Their holdings totaled something over fifteen million acres--an average of about 75 acres per family. The Great Migration North During World War I and the years immediately following it, African Americans continued to be concentrated regionally in the South and occupationally in agriculture. Two trends began to undermine these concentrations. First, U.S. entry in to the war in 1916 created thousands of new jobs in northern cities, and northern black leaders urged the oppressed populations of the rural South to move north. Second, cotton prices fell again, depressing the southern economy. Although black farmers were still more heavily involved in cotton growing than white farmers, government farm aid went primarily to the white farmers. The new black-owned lending institutions that had helped promote African American land ownership were hit hard; were unable to collect on their loans, many went bankrupt. The troubles of black farmers were compounded by the spread of the boll weevil, an insect that destroyed cotton crops. These new problems forced many black landowners to consider returning to sharecropping or working for white farmers as laborers at deplorable wages. Between 1910 and 1920, about 300,000 African Americans left the predominantly rural South, mostly for northern cities, in a movement that became known as the Great Migration. During the 1920's, the exodus grew greater, as an estimated 1,500,000 African Americans left the South between 1920 and 1930. The Depression The 1930's were hard years for many Americans but were even harder on African Americans--especially African Americans who worked in agriculture or had commercial ties to it. Black-owned banks, dependent on loans to African American farmers, had already started failing before the Depression. Of the fifty black-owned lending institutions in existence in 1911, only about twenty-five survived to 1930. Three years later, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to stop investors from withdrawing all the money from banks by closing banks for three days, only eleven black-owned banks remained in the entire United States. As northern jobs dried up during the Depression, the movement of African Americans to northern cities slowed. Surplus agricultural labor became plentiful in the South, and agricultural wages dropped. Black tenant farmers found it increasingly difficult to come up with rent for land and the sharecropping system took on renewed life. According to the U.S. Farm Security Administration, by the end of the 1930's, 47 percent of all African Americans in farming were sharecroppers, 32 percent were tenant farmers, and only 21 percent were landowners. In 1931, African American farmers, supported and encouraged by the Communist Party, joined together to found the Sharecroppers Union in Alabama. The union spread to other states and may have had as many as twelve thousand members by 1935. However, the union's connection with the Communist Party hindered its growth, as many black farmers were reluctant to become involved with an organization that had communist sponsorship. Some government programs made the problems of African American farmers worse. For example, the federal Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed in 1933, paid farmers to cut back on their production of crops in order to stabilize crop prices. With an incentive to produce less, landowners frequently fired their farmworkers and evicted tenant farmers--workers who were predominantly black. Some funds paid by the Department of Agriculture were intended to go to workers or tenants, but the money went directly to landowners, who typically passed on little or none of it. In response, black and white tenant farmers in Arkansas formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934. This organization spread to six other states and acquired an estimated 30,000 members. With little support from the federal government, however, the union gradually faded. The Decline of African American Agriculture With the entry of the United States into World War II at the end of 1941, the African American movement to northern cities that had slowed during the Depression began once again. In the years that followed the war, African American movement out of rural areas and out of agriculture grew rapidly. In 1940, slightly fewer than one in three African American workers were in jobs in agriculture; this proportion dropped to less than one in four by 1950. By 1960, fewer than one in ten African Americans were in agriculture. The decrease continued steadily, so that by the year 2000, only slightly more than one in one hundred African Americans were in agriculture. Meanwhile, the small farms owned by African Americans had become outdated, as large-scale agribusiness took over farming throughout the United States. Demand for farmworkers declined steadily over the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1960's, the sharecropper system had virtually disappeared in most of the South, where mechanization had reduced the need for human labor. In 1967, the federal government included agricultural workers under its minimum wage law. As a result, farmworkers immediately became much more expensive for southern planters, who became even more reliant on machines and began controlling weeds with chemicals, instead of workers with hoes. After centuries of heavy African American concentration in agriculture, black agricultural workers had almost disappeared. A decline in the numbers of black farmworkers was not the only change. The remaining farmworkers were growing much older. Few young African Americans were going into agricultural work by the end of the twentieth century. During the 1990's, the median age for black farmers was sixty years, one in every four was over seventy years old. These aging farmers held only a small percentage of America's farm land. Of the 960 million acres of agricultural land in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, only about 2.6 million acres--0.25 percent--were owned by African Americans. Suing the Federal Government Many African American farmers have argued that a long history of government discrimination against them has continued. In 1997, organizations representing them filed a class action lawsuit against the federal Department of Agriculture. The farmers maintained that the department had discriminated against them by denying them loans and other forms of aid. This discrimination, according to the farmers, contributed to the decline of African American agriculture. In April, 1999, federal district court Judge Paul L. Friedman approved a settlement agreement on the case. African American farmers could file for compensation along two tracks. On the first track, they could file claims of past discrimination and receive automatic payments of fifty thousand dollars upon approval of their claims. The second track made possible greater compensation for farmers, but only after they went through hearings. The deadline for submitting claims was in September, 2000. These settlement did not end legal action and did not end complaints about discrimination by Department of Agriculture. Some farmers objected that the department had not sufficiently publicized the availability of compensation before the deadline passed. Others said that the department was slow in awarding compensation money and resisted paying out the money at every opportunity. By July, 2002, the Department of Agriculture had awarded about $645 million in payments and forgiven loans. However, this was only a small portion of the amount that should have been paid, according to some observers. A report issued in the summer of 2004 by the Washington-based Environmental Working Group maintained that the Department of Agriculture had assigned Justice Department lawyers to fight claims. Among the 94,000 farmers who filed for compensation, according to the report, 81,000, or nearly 90 percent, were denied their claims. Carl L. Bankston III Further ReadingBanks, Vera J. Rural Research Development Report No. 59: Black Farmers and Their Farms. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1986. U.S. government report on black farming in the United States. Daniel, Pete. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Classic and widely cited work on rural race relations during the years when sharecropping was the major concentration of African Americans in agriculture. Gilbert, Charlene, and Quinn Eli. Homecoming: The Story of African American Farmers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. A companion volume to Charlene Gilbert's film Homecoming, this book provides a compelling introduction to the history of African American farmers and contains an excellent selection of historic photographs. Nieman, Donald G. From Slavery to Sharecropping: White Land and Black Labor in the Rural South, 1865-1900. New York: Garland, 1994. Thorough coverage of the history of black farmworkers during the transition from slavery to sharecropping. Tolnay, Stewart E. The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Provides an intimate look at how African Americans farmers lived. See Also Demographic trends; Economic trends; Employment; Great Migration; Sharecropping; Slavery |
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