Up from the Soil: Agricultural Production, Racial Uplift, and Cultivating Citizenship in the Southern Workman

Abstract

abstract: In response to a request by attendees of the 1897 inaugural Hampton Institute Negro Conference, editors of Hampton's central mouthpiece, the Southern Workman (1872–1939), revised the content of the periodical to better serve the needs of rural African American southerners battling exploitative renting, mortgage, and sharecropping systems. This article explores overlooked agricultural literature produced by and for African American readers of the Southern Workman who aspired to landownership and farming, from formerly enslaved subscribers to Hampton's African American students. I examine the agricultural vignettes of Alabama land cooperative leader, John W. Lemon, and the firsthand farming accounts of Oklahoman settlers, S. J. Faver and Logan Morgan. A blending of success stories and advice literature, their writings offer blueprints to struggling and would-be landowners and farmers seeking labor autonomy and economic prosperity. Often dismissed as unprogressive because its focus on manual labor, a closer examination of Hampton's most prominent print platform expands our understanding of how rural southern African Americans in the Jim Crow era harnessed the periodical press to circulate pathways toward realizing racial uplift and cultivating citizenship in ways that were rooted in the land.