Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas

Abstract

Cooperative demonstration work began in Texas in 1903 as an effort to teach farmers new methods of crop cultivation and management. However, black farmers in Texas were excluded from demonstration work until the Smith-Lever Agricultural Extension Act in 1914. By World War I, the resulting Negro Division included a complicated bureaucracy of African American agents who reported to white officials, were supervised by black administrators, and served black farmers. The measurable successes of these African American farmers exacerbated racial tensions and led to pressure on agents to maintain the racial status quo. In Reaping a Greater Harvest, Reid deftly spotlights further hierarchies of class and gender within the extension service. Her analysis clearly demonstrates how the same system that enabled the agents and the farmers they served to wield some political influence also kept them dependent on a racialized state that systematically discriminated against them and maintained the white-dominated southern landscape. Historians of race, gender, and class will join agricultural historians in valuing this careful examination of an understudied development in a corner of the Jim Crow South.