"Somebody Done Nailed Us on the Cross": Federal Farm and Welfare Policy and the Civil Rights Movement in the Mississippi Delta

Abstract

Hailed as a savior by some and scorned as a meddler by others, the federal government has played a major role in shaping the economy and society of the post-New Deal South. Yet federal policies have not necessarily functioned in behalf of change, and federally induced changes in one segment of southern life have sometimes contributed to continuity in another. Such was the case with many New Deal programs whose potential for upsetting the South's racial and economic hierarchy stood at odds with the Roosevelt administration's efforts to maintain the support of key southern members of Congress. If the New Deal sought rapid economic recovery while settling for social peace in its time, it nonetheless unloosed technological and ideological forces that threatened the overall stability of southern society. Amid steadily rising social tensions, these contradictory forces moved slowly toward a fullscale collision in the 1960s when the government-induced revolution in agriculture provided the economic and demographic backdrop for the major policy initiatives of the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. Nowhere was the intersection of those policies more meaningful than in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the last stronghold of the plantation and the birthplace of the Citizens' Council, a region where the affluent and uncompromisingly conservative planter minority had the most to lose and the impoverished and disfranchised black majority the most to gain from any federal program that threatened to alter socioeconomic and political relationships between the races.1