Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Land Ownership among Freed African American Farmers: The View from Ceramic Use at the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead, Manchaca, Texas

Abstract

There are few studies of post-emancipation-period African American agrarian landowners because their numbers were small in contrast to those African Americans who remained landless. Archaeologists’ emphasis on sharecroppers has overlooked the socioeconomic diversity within the African American community and minimized the importance of land ownership to the assertion of black freedom. Using the ceramics recovered from the Ransom and Sarah Williams farmstead, an historical African American site in central Texas, I show that land ownership enhanced the lives of freed African Americans by enabling them to become self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was an important strategy that ensured their racial and economic autonomy within a precarious agricultural economy. However, their position was liminal because racism precluded them from using their landholdings in any way beyond the achievement of self-sufficiency. Therefore, land ownership was not economically emancipatory because African Americans were not able to build wealth.