White Landowners Research Articles

‘A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Jamaica’: Pseudobiblical Style and Jamaican Proto-nationalism

Abstract Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, now widely recognized as a watershed in the history of the Atlantic world, fundamentally shaped discussions about Jamaica’s political and legal status within the British empire. Here, I analyze a little-known narrative of the rebellion written by Jewish newspaper editor Sidney Levien in pseudobiblical style, with almost every sentence of the account echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible. I locate Levien’s narrative within a literary tradition that used pseudobiblical style to describe contemporary political life, especially in America. The literary tradition, identified by historian Eran Shalev, transposed contemporary politics into events of biblical proportion. By using pseudobiblical style, Levien advanced a sense of Jamaica’s importance in nineteenth-century political imagination. While many accounts conceptualized the rebellion as a struggle between White landowners and Black laborers, Levien refused to present Jamaica as a White fatherland or a Black republic.

The fast track land reform of Zimbabwe read through the lens of Ubuntu

ABSTRACT The Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) of Zimbabwe (2000–2002) has been studied from economic perspectives that emphasise inequalities between landowners and the black majority. Other studies have focused on the violence engendered in the process of reclaiming land. Critical questions have not been raised about the sense of justice, and sensitivity to human lives lost, during the process of land takeovers. Hardened ideological positions of both white landowners and the nationalists over land can be considered to have led to extra-judicial killings, corruption, and loss of livelihoods for land owners and their farm labourers. This article applies the concept of Ubuntu to measure what was lost in terms of humaneness, prospects for true reconciliation, and compensatory and distributive justice from a process that emphasised violence over dialogue. Secondary, internet sources and limited interviews were used to gauge people’s perceptions of the manner of the FTLRP due to land restorative processes that to violate the very idea of dialogue to resolve conflicts encouraged in the philosophy of Ubuntu. The article provides recommendations of what could have been done to preserve the essential elements of Ubuntuism that put value on the otherness of the other persons in any situation.

Ancestral Dignity in Public Monuments

Ancestral Dignity in Public Monuments

Respecting the Manning Family: Jane Manning James and Her Family in Wilton, Connecticut

Respecting the Manning Family: Jane Manning James and Her Family in Wilton, Connecticut

Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch William G. Robbins MAKING A MODERN U.S. WEST: THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF A REGION AND ITS BORDERS, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2022. Bibliography, index, notes. 656 pages. $50.00 cloth. Making a Modern U.S. West, a volume in the University of Nebraska Press History of the American West Series, covers the period from the 1890s to the eve of World War II. The first of the four chronological sections covers the federal government’s organization of its new continental and overseas empire and the lives of people in its territories. The second section treats trans-border movements involving corporate money, organized labor, women’s suffrage, and government and capital suppression during World War I. Part three focuses on speculative investment in natural resources and tourism in the 1920s, and the fourth part involves the deportation of Mexican laborers, New Deal efforts to organize union workers, and John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act. To slow speculative activity in public lands, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1891, permitting the president to withdraw federal forests from the public domain. The problem, Sarah Deutsch writes, was that forests were “under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, which had no foresters. The Department of the Interior had foresters but no reserves” (p. 41). In fact, the opposite was true, the forest reserves were under the Interior Department and foresters were in the Department of Agriculture. President Theodore Roosevelt transferred the forests to the Department of Agriculture in 1905 under Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot and the Forest Service. Deutsch misidentifies the Homestead Act (1862) with the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, the legislation designed to settle the arid West. The act doubled land grants to 320 acres, attracting an inrush of homesteaders to arid regions. A period of extended drought “forced three-quarters of those who had arrived since 1916 to leave” (p. 133). The great American dilemma, race, functioned differently depending on location. Deutsch identifies conflicting and inconsistent accounts in federal commissions involving the classification of Mexicans. An Industrial Commission report in 1901 grouped Mexicans and Indians as “foreign whites,” while most of its commentary focused on Chinese and Japanese immigrants who dominated the news. When commissioners learned that Mexicans composed one-third of maintenance workers on Southwest railroads, they devoted one paragraph in the 800-page report to “Mexican peon labor.” The Dillingham Commission in 1911 complained about the lack of data on Mexicans in the United States but still devoted a few pages to Mexicans as an unprogressive race but intelligent enough for common jobs. Deusch devotes considerable attention to cross-border revolutions, giving greater attention to the Southwest than insurgencies north of the forty-ninth parallel. She offers an important reality about the southern border: “The Mexican Revolution laid bare that the history of the Mexican North and the U.S. Southwest were inseparable” (p. 132). Radical democratic movements existed across both southern and northern borders. Women’s movements followed similar trajectories, Montana electing the first woman to Congress in 1916, Canadians electing the first woman to sit in a legislature in the British Empire, and two Mexican states sponsoring Mexico’s first women’s congresses. The federal government joined with western corporations in suppressing the Industrial Workers of America and the Non-Partisan League when the United States entered World War I. To tell the story of the Northwest lumber industry, the government’s organization of the Loyal [End Page 404] Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, and the suppression of unions, the author relies on Harold Hyman’s nearly sixty-year-old book, Soldiers and Spruce (1963). Making a Modern U.S. West explains the conflicted state and federal efforts to marginalize Indians’ and other minorities’ rights to land ownership. Deutsch cites John Collier’s importance as a forceful proponent of fighting for the integrity of Pueblo lands. During the 1920s, fears about Japanese land ownership among White landowners along the West Coast prompted California to worry that the state was becoming a Japanese colony. Legislatures in...

Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea

In this book, Rhea chronicles the life and career of a Civil War soldier and South Carolina politician whom he considers to be a “giant” in the Black freedom struggle (153). Born into a free Black family and raised in Pennsylvania and New York, Swails enlisted in the famous 54th Massachusetts in 1863, serving in numerous engagements and ultimately rising through the ranks to First Lieutenant, despite prohibitions on Black men receiving officers’ commissions in the United States Army. After the war, Swails settled in Kingstree, South Carolina, where he raised a family, practiced law, and served actively in Republican politics. He held many elected offices during Reconstruction, including mayor of Kingstree and state senator (also serving as speaker pro tempore of the South Carolina state senate).Rhea devotes a substantial portion of the biography to piecing together Swails’ service in the 54th Massachusetts, when, as Rhea argues, Swails served honorably while fighting against individual and systemic discrimination against Black soldiers. Swails participated in his unit’s fight for equal pay and, subsequently, advocated and won the right to receive the commission of a Second Lieutenant as a line officer. By focusing on Swails’ experiences in the 54th Massachusetts, Rhea laudably attempts to shift focus away from Robert Gould Shaw to a Black soldier. Unfortunately, because Swails’ military service did not leave much of a paper trail, Rhea relies heavily on Luis Emilio’s regimental memoir as well as Shaw’s papers.1 Swails, therefore, often disappears from the narrative for several pages; in fact, his own words are not recounted until the third chapter.Once Rhea reaches the Reconstruction era, the lack of documents dissipates, and Swails’ work with the Freedmen’s Bureau and his career as a Republican politician come alive. In the years following the war, Rhea contends that Swails worked tirelessly to secure Black freedom—first attempting to facilitate fair labor contracts between Black farmers and white landowners and later serving myriad roles in local and state politics. Attempting to capitalize on his northern birth, Swails courted Black and white voters from among both Republicans and Democrats. By the mid-1870s, he wielded significant political and patronage power in his own Williamsburg County and beyond. Republicans were forced to contend with Swails’ influence. Democratic Redeemers ultimately charged Swails with corruption, chasing him out of South Carolina and threatening to kill him if he ever returned. In these chapters about Reconstruction, Rhea is at his best, centering Swails in order to offer a concise and clear picture of the interplay between politics and vigilantism in South Carolina.Throughout the biography, Rhea provides an engaging narrative that general readers will appreciate. Yet at times, Rhea makes his important arguments only by intimation, in a manner that scholars may find frustrating. Rhea suggests that Swails’ military service paved the way for his postwar career and his long fight against discrimination; the professional experience that he gained as a commissioned officer prepared him for both militia and political leadership. Rhea could have hammered this point home more forcefully. He also implies (in the same vein as other historians) that Swails earned his citizenship on the battlefield; academic readers may well lament that he did not make this connection more explicitly. Furthermore, although Rhea’s citation style enables smooth reading, it can blur the distinction between reconstructed narrative and direct evidence. Scholars, again, may find this by-product of the framework inconvenient. The decision to make the book accessible to a wider audience, however, makes sense. Rhea brings to life a lesser-known participant in the Black experience of Reconstruction, encouraging his readership to consider carefully the role that Black veterans played in shaping postwar politics.

Silent Winds, Dry Seas by Vinod Busjeet

Reviewed by: Silent Winds, Dry Seas by Vinod Busjeet Nikhita Obeegadoo Vinod Busjeet Silent Winds, Dry Seas New York. Doubleday. 2021. 288 pages. SILENT WINDS, DRY SEAS is one of the first novels by a Mauritian author to be originally published in the United States. Deeply imbued with autobiographical elements, it is a coming-of-age story and a tale of emigration. But most of all, Silent Winds, Dry Seas is a love letter to Independence-era Mauritius. From the very first page, the narrator, Vishnu’s, story is imbricated within a greater familial and historical context: “We were in my parents’ house in Mahébourg, on the southeast coast of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. The first Bhushan, who arrived from India in 1853, moved to this predominantly Creole town after completing his five years of indentured labor on Ferney Sugar Estate.” From this first ancestor begins the sprawling tree that will become the Bhushan clan, a family simultaneously tethered and fractured [End Page 62] by love, loyalty, honor, and the occasional court case to settle a land dispute. Vishnu’s narrative voice is funny and endearing; readers are invested in his character arc as he grows from a boy to a man. Ultimately, his fervent devotion to educational attainment leads him away from his coastal village to a PhD at Harvard University. Busjeet gives the tale of upward mobility an ironical twist: as an international student in the United States, he is unable to completely eschew the manual work that he thought his ancestors had left behind. While Silent Winds, Dry Seas will eventually span continents, it is most powerful in its evocation of an island shrouded in the mists of time. We find outdoor kitchens, railway stations, and windows perpetually left open in the summer. Cyclones follow on each other’s heels, and old retirees spend their time attending trials at the District Court. The images are even more powerfully distilled in the poetic interludes that intersperse Busjeet’s prose: “Injustice is a schoolboy beaten for eating ice-cream, one lash for every scoop. Multiculturalism is the freedom to choose between a suit and a dhoti. Courage is a vegetarian homemaker who spends her life rearing and then cooking chicken for her husband’s favorite meal.” Through a varied cast of characters— Creole fishermen, Hindu planters, white landowners, Chinese shopkeepers—the novel introduces us to the diversity of the Mauritian population and to the many languages that condition their everyday lives. The novel is peppered with expressions in Creole—so l’esprit tine fatigué, ti blanc, macatia chaud chaud—as well as more colorful swear words that the Mauritian reader might blush to read. Busjeet is careful to note the transformed valences of foreign words adopted into Creole: if the Hindi tamasha continues to denote “song and dance, fun and excitement, as well as commotion and drama,” the French négresse does not refer to race but rather to a woman’s coquettish nature. Bhojpuri is rendered as part of the linguistic code-switching employed by Indo-Mauritians in public situations where they do not wish to be understood by others—we also find a Chinese shopkeeper and his wife employing Hakka to similar effect. Busjeet’s narrative is deeply attentive to the intertwined ways in which gender, class, and ethnoreligious belonging—termed communauté in Mauritius—condition lived experience. The fact that men are all flavored with “the same sauce” modulates the text like a leitmotif, and humor is an important weapon of critique: “Our ancestors left India a hundred years ago. Who really knows how they did things in the old country? Each family in Mauritius has its own pandit, and every pandit does his own thing.” Societal divides, Vishnu shows us, are powerful, and yet they are often dismantled by the equally powerful forces of love and solidarity. As a rule, inter-communauté love stories are not tolerated. And yet, when a relative comes to tear apart a mixed couple living together in a conservative Hindu rural area, the villagers are staunchly on the couple’s side. Initially resentful of his rowdy multicultural neighborhood, Vishnu comes to realize how deeply they root for his success...

Carceral geographies of pesticides and poultry

In this article, we focus on the agro-environmental dimensions of plantation agriculture in the U.S. South, examining the ways carceral relations constrain foodways through the interrelated control of human and non-human life, the racialized monopolization of land, and the production of hunger. Through a focus on the chemicalization of cotton plantation agriculture and the transformation of chicken to poultry, we show how the racialized control of life and labor has been extended temporally and spatially by means of agricultural technologies. In the decades following the abolition of slavery, white landowners enrolled legal structures of racialized coercion and agricultural technologies in the service of continued plantation production. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, we trace these dynamics in cotton and poultry production in the 20th century, we show how technologies putatively oriented toward agricultural “productivity” extended the carceral dynamics of prisons through agro-environmental racism, the control of land and labor, and the production of hunger. Cotton chemicals and poultry plant speedups, we argue, represent racial and spatial relations of material and ideological control and containment that displace nourishing and liberatory ways of living and relating.

We Might ‘Overcome Someday': West Tennessee’s Rural Freedom Movement

After white landowners evicted black sharecroppers in late 1960 for registering to vote, activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties organized ‘Tent Cities' in a bid to focus national media attention on their plight. Over the decade, it developed into a wide-reaching campaign for desegregation in public accommodations and education, welfare reform, voting rights, and sustained community improvement measures. This little-known episode significantly advances scholarly understanding of rural civil rights activism. Notably this story reveals complex dualities including: a local grassroots movement bolstered by a national framework of organizations and social networks; leadership on national, state and local levels; collaboration despite tensions along race, age, class and gender lines; coexistence of nonviolent strategies and armed self-defense; and varied initiatives demonstrating activists’ focus on local needs.

The Agribusiness Model in South African Land Reform? Land Use Implications for the Land Reform Beneficiaries

The land reform programme of the South African government aims, among other things, at generating large-scale employment, increasing rural incomes and combatting poverty. However, the programme equally enforces an agribusiness model that promotes large-scale production through failure to subdivide the large farms, and encouraging the beneficiaries to use the land in the manner that the former white landowners did. The article demonstrates the unsuitability of large-scale production for the land reform beneficiaries, given its unsustainable production costs. On the contrary, the limited costs associated with the small-scale model allow the beneficiaries, including those relying on off-farm income, to produce with better effect.

Rewriting the South African Pastoral: Pitfalls of the Plaasroman in Craig Higginson’s The Dream House

This paper will consider Craig Higginson’s The Dream House (2015) as a powerful, albeit problematic rewriting of the South African pastoral. Staging his narrative against the backdrop of a farm currently undergoing redevelopment into a residential complex, his Midlands KwaZulu-Natal setting allows the novel to contemplate the land as an ongoing symbol of belonging and dispossession, precarious labour and anxiety, late capitalism and power in the South African ecological vocabulary. Within the specific context of this narrative, the land itself, the unproductive farm, and the animals bred on it, work collectively as a motif for the perpetuation of environmental racism. The climactic confrontation between white landowner and her black protégé stages a reflection of their failed dialogue over the years and resounds with archetypal significance. Their fraught exchange centres around their, respectively, incommensurate memories of the contested farm – offering Looksmart the opportunity to challenge Patricia’s colonial paternalism towards him and the other black employees. Their conversation in tracking their memories and experiences works to reflect political, racial and environmental change in the postcolony. Taking its cue from the work of J.M. Coetzee (White Writing 1988), this paper will consider the degree to which Higginson’s novel presents a meaningful challenge to the plaasroman as a ‘literature of failure’ and what alternatives it opens up in dealing with relationships between possessors and dispossessed in the South African rural economy.

Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma by Karlyn Forner

Reviewed by: Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma by Karlyn Forner Camille Walsh Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma. By Karlyn Forner. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 350. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7005-5; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-7000-0.) Selma, Alabama, has been a defining symbolic location for twentieth-century U.S. history, as most recently memorialized in the popular film Selma (2014). Yet as Karlyn Forner deftly shows in her book Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma, these snapshots of the city as a timeless icon of the civil rights movement run the risk of oversimplifying the long history of struggle before and after 1965. More crucially, Selma as symbol nourishes a triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement as past rather than present and erases the decades of political exclusion and economic dispossession that continued long after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the spirit of several historical works over the past decade that have complicated understandings of the unfinished work of economic transformation in the civil rights movement, this book highlights the resilience of communities both in the city and on the farms of Dallas County in the Alabama black belt that historically linked many black families to the region. Drawing on a rich array of sources from local and state agencies, personal papers, government minutes and census records, oral histories, personal interviews, and newspapers and organizational pamphlets, Forner provides the reader with a complex story and a clear, powerful narrative. Because Forner focuses so consciously on a sense of place, the reader is able to watch over decades as black tenant farmers were gradually forced off their land through intertwined systems of racial and economic control at the local, state, and national levels. Forner exposes the complex tools with which white supremacy operated over the twentieth century to ensure that black Alabamians bore the brunt of economic hardship in a geographic area in which black people had long outnumbered white people. She traces these processes as they circled back to each other, including the better-known histories of the Great Depression, the boll weevil outbreak, and the New Deal agricultural policies that often benefited white landowners at the expense of black tenant farmers, as well as the interwoven stories of agricultural extension officials, consolidated livestock farming, anti-union intimidation, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the systematic targeting of any black leader who spoke in favor of economic justice. [End Page 231] Forner traces the experiences of local leaders and groups in Selma and Dallas County through the demographic and economic shifts during and after both world wars, showing how these major global events solidified particular kinds of black community organizing as well as specific types of white supremacist opposition. The roles played by the farm bureau and the chamber of commerce receive as much attention as the state and national Democratic Party, speaking to the important historiographical trend of focusing on local processes and systems in addition to national politics and parties. Forner also emphasizes the mounting frustration over decades of Jim Crow segregation and the cold, casual brutality of white economic control, as the community came together to respond to black men brought to trial before all-white juries, to create a petition to desegregate Selma's schools the year after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and to provide political education on the theft of labor to Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) antipoverty organizers. By the time Forner's story reaches SNCC's voter registration efforts, Bloody Sunday, and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, the reader has a clear understanding of how and why the voting rights movement reached its peak in Selma—and also why it was never just about the vote. Camille Walsh University of Washington Bothell Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America by Michel Gobat

Reviewed by: Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America by Michel Gobat Matthew J. Clavin Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. By Michel Gobat. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 367. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-73749-5.) Though contemporaries of slave owners, slave traders, and secessionists, filibusters still stand out for their negative portrayal in the historiography of antebellum America. Dedicated to spreading slavery beyond the borders of the U.S. South, they waged violent wars against foreign people and nations, [End Page 442] imperiled freedom throughout the Americas, and brought the United States to the brink of civil war. The reputation is hard to refute. But in this important study, Michel Gobat shows that in the case of William Walker's infamous conquest of Nicaragua in the 1850s, Central Americans invited filibusters to their shores and then assisted the invaders in toppling the government. According to Gobat, whose first book on the United States' occupation of Nicaragua in the early twentieth century similarly exploited Spanish and English sources to great effect, William Walker and the filibusters he commanded were "liberal imperialists" fighting to bring American business and technology, along with a free and democratic political system, to a region in desperate need of assistance (p. 156). With northern Free Soilers, free black emigrationists, and European revolutionaries composing a portion of Walker's army, it is no surprise that native Nicaraguans—from elite white landowners to dark-skinned farmers, shopkeepers, and soldiers—saw in these filibusters an opportunity to remake their young nation into a miniature version of the United States. The experiment was, for a brief moment, successful. After disembarking on Nicaragua's west coast in the summer of 1855, Walker and his followers brought peace to a war-torn nation and instituted a series of reforms that resulted in the creation of a fully functioning nation-state. In collaboration with countless native Nicaraguans, including lowly peasants, powerful property owners, and Catholic priests, Walker and his filibusters established a court and tax-collection system, an all-volunteer army, a customhouse, and a post office. The objective at all times was clear: "Americanization" (p. 5). More than a brief chapter in the long history of manifest destiny, Walker's Nicaraguan conquest, according to Gobat, was a pivotal moment in the history of the Americas. Building on an idea he first articulated in the American Historical Review, Gobat considers the episode crucial in the "invention of Latin America" ("The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race," American Historical Review, 118 [December 2013], pp. 1345-75). After several months of Walker's rule, Central Americans united in an armed revolt against the filibusters and expelled them from the region. "The idea of Latin America," Gobat boldly contends in this book, "was the most enduring outcome of the anti-U.S. moment" (p. 96). Desperate to reclaim his position of power, Walker returned to the United States. While northerners had grown suspicious of his enterprise and withdrew their support, white southerners who were hell-bent on spreading their peculiar institution to the tropics continued to rally behind his cause. By insisting that Walker's proslavery position emerged only at this moment, Gobat takes his biggest swing at the conventional wisdom regarding filibusterism. In so doing, he erroneously paints the adventurer—who in 1856 infamously re-legalized slavery in Nicaragua—as an antislavery activist. With freedom and slavery often serving as two sides of the same coin, Walker ultimately strove to spread both—far beyond the United States' southern border. That being said, Gobat should be commended. He has produced an outstanding transnational history that, because of its originality and style, will appeal to scholars and students alike. [End Page 443] Matthew J. Clavin University of Houston Copyright © 2019 Southern Historical Association

Freedom and Convict Leasing in the Postbellum South

In 1868, the state of Georgia began punishing convicts by leasing them to private companies. Georgia’s transition from penitentiary confinement to convict leasing coincided with a shift in the composition of its inmates. Fifteen years after the Civil War, African-Americans in Georgia were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. This article finds that black men were most likely to be imprisoned in the convict lease system where they overcame whites’ efforts to preserve their position as dependent agricultural laborers. Where elite white landowners were able to reconstitute a dependent agricultural labor force, they had little reason to use the convict lease system to punish their workers. But in urban counties and in counties where African-Americans had acquired considerable landholdings, black men faced comparatively high rates of imprisonment for property crimes.

The 2017 Shooting of Kuki Gallmann and the Politics of Conservation in Northern Kenya

Abstract:This article situates the shooting of white Kenyan landowner Kuki Gallmann within recent critiques of community-based conservation and the politics of whiteness in Kenya. I discuss how conservation has enabled white landowners to consolidate their influence over Laikipia County, as well as neighboring regions of Kenya via an organization called the Northern Rangelands Trust. The NRT is feared to be undermining regional livestock economies, while contributing to land shortages that have precipitated violence in Laikipia. I argue that the pastoralists implicated in these conflicts are subject to a maelstrom of livelihood stressors, some of which are aggravated by the efforts of white Kenyans to expand conservation throughout northern Kenya.

"A Law Abiding People": Alabama's 1901 Constitution and the Attempted Lynching of Jim Brown

"A Law Abiding People":Alabama's 1901 Constitution and the Attempted Lynching of Jim Brown James L. Baggett (bio) Dell garrett finished classes at spring lake college in Springville, Alabama, at about 3:00 in the afternoon on Tuesday, May 7, 1901. Garrett reported later that as she walked home she noticed Jim Brown, a local African American farmhand, following her along a wooded stretch of road. Garrett, who was white, said Brown caught up to her, forced her into the woods, raped her, and tried to drown her in a pond. As Garrett lay in the water semiconscious, Brown pulled off his old work shoes and threw them into the pond, put on a better pair of shoes, changed his clothing, and fled. Bruised and drenched, Garrett stumbled to the house where she lived with her parents and fainted just inside the front door. Her father alerted neighbors and notified the sheriff. The authorities sent telegrams to surrounding towns and several groups of local white men searched the woods around Springville throughout the night. If Jim Brown had been found, he would have surely been lynched because he was accused, and assumed guilty, of raping a white woman. Most lynchings [End Page 200] that occurred from the 1880s to the 1900s did not involve accusations of interracial sexual assault, but that is the crime most associated with lynching. And such accusations often sent white mobs into violent frenzies.1 While white mobs chased Jim Brown hoping to lynch him, other Alabama whites looked to end the practice. Many white southerners still viewed lynching as necessary to maintain white supremacy. An appalling number of whites considered lynching entertainment. But a vocal group of white political leaders, newspaper editors, and community leaders came to view lynching as a barbarous act that stained the reputation and honor of their states, drew the unwanted attention of the federal government, encouraged contempt for the law and the legal process, and chased away the cheap black laborers that white landowners and industrialists exploited. White leaders recognized that as they disfranchised blacks, white supremacy could be maintained without mob violence. This article will explore white opposition to lynching at the turn of the twentieth century, the efforts of Alabama's political leaders to prevent lynching though the mechanism of the 1901 state constitution, and case of Jim Brown and Dell Garrett. While the Brown case was not specifically discussed at the constitutional convention, it was covered extensively in Alabama's newspapers. It is likely that most delegates were aware of the case, and their debates show that they were aware of earlier lynchings and of lynchings that had been prevented. The Brown case, which unfolded on the ground as the convention was in session, provides a contemporaneous illustration of the debates going on inside and outside the convention. That debate among whites was only incidentally about [End Page 201] saving black lives, and not at all about how to prevent interracial rape; the debate was over how to maintain white supremacy without the ugly and degrading spectacle of mob murder. In the decade preceding Alabama's constitutional convention, African American activists kept the issue of lynching before the public. In 1893, crusading Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells published a series of anti-lynching editorials in the pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In the pamphlet and later writings, Wells demonstrated that most southern lynchings did not involve charges of rape, but instead occurred to assert white racial control and retard black economic advancement. Organizations like the National Afro-American Council and the National Negro Business League denounced lynching and called on states and the federal government to prosecute lynchers. These efforts were reported in newspapers throughout the country, including in Alabama. In addition to such activism, some black communities fought back against mobs. In Cleveland, Mississippi, a "band of armed negroes" on horseback rode into the town and exchanged gunfire with a group of white men. The raid was assumed to be retaliation for a lynching that occurred earlier that night. Less than one year before the constitutional convention, on July 30, 1900, whites in Huntsville, Alabama, armed themselves with "a consignment...

The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness by Monica R. Gisolfi

Reviewed by: The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusinessby Monica R. Gisolfi Megan Birk The Takeover: Chicken Farming and the Roots of American Agribusiness. By Monica R. Gisolfi. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 104. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4971-8; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3578-0.) In this brief examination of the modern chicken industry in Georgia, Monica R. Gisolfi outlines the historical transition from unprofitable cotton to the equally challenging poultry business. The major players in Georgia include cotton farmers barely surviving while doing irreparable damage to the soil, extension service agents, land grant schools, and developers of the agribusiness model for chicken farming such as Jesse Dixon Jewell. Gisolfi traces the rise of poultry production in the region to the dismal failings of cotton. When the opportunity to farm chickens looked like a financial windfall during World War II, farmers who had not already left the land for better jobs saw poultry as a new, more profitable option. They were furnished with feed and chicks in exchange for keeping their buildings and equipment up to modern standards. The expense of the farm upgrades pushed out thousands of farmers. Those who stayed, according to Gisolfi, became trapped in a cycle of debt not unlike that involved in cotton production, but they owed larger amounts; families put up entire farms as collateral. Buttressing this change were New Deal policies such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act and rural electrification, which privileged white farm owners over renters, tenants, and African American farmers. [End Page 783]The extension service also played a role, encouraging poultry over cotton with research, data, and training that it then made available only to white farmers, further alienating anyone who was not a white landowner. The cost of this change was not just environmental, as the placement of the book in the Environmental History and the American South series might indicate. It also robbed women of "pin money" and on-farm earning opportunities, since women often handled poultry production for additional income. Chicken farming also did not save farm men from having to pursue off-farm employment. Because production costs often exceeded the income from chickens, many farmers found themselves working two jobs. Because they owned only the land and the buildings, producers resembled sharecroppers or tenants more than independent farmers. Agribusiness was the significant driver of change in Georgia. Chicken middlemen, like Jewell, enticed farmers with what appeared to be low-risk arrangements on the finished birds. Price fluctuations were absorbed by the furnishing company, but the debt accrued by farmers could be exacerbated if they rejected any aspect of the arrangement. Readers will find these themes overlap in familiar ways with Steve Striffler's Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food(New Haven, 2005), which offers a similar explanation of the furnishing contracts and more detailed descriptions of wartime rationing and the roles that processing played in the growth of the chicken industry. Gisolfi's book ends with a brief discussion of the environmental effects of chicken farming and processing on communities. The fumes, water pollution, resource draining, and other pitfalls are similar to those involved in large-scale pork and beef production. The information here holds value and is strongest in the analysis of the federal government as a participant in the changes, but the environmental discussion feels stunted. Gisolfi does not make it entirely clear how or if Georgia is unique compared with other parts of the South that have experienced similar transitions, such as Arkansas and North Carolina. Megan Birk University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald

Reviewed by: Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South by Michael W. Fitzgerald Kenneth W. Noe Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 451. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6606-2.) An unexpected sesquicentennial is following hard on the heels of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Conflicting memories and agendas, polarizing political rhetoric, exposed corruption in high places, struggles for public space and unobstructed ballot boxes, and tragic acts of senseless violence followed by judicial apathy now rise regularly like the ghosts of Reconstruction. Some voices even warn of a new redemption. Accounts and attitudes born in Reconstruction's aftermath, meanwhile, continue to have currency in many circles and appear regularly in a bevy of newspaper comment sections and Facebook memes. As Michael W. Fitzgerald observes at the beginning of Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South, the major survey of Alabama in the Reconstruction era somehow remains Walter L. Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York, 1905), a volume that is not only well over a century old but also steeped in the racist assumptions of its times. In this new work, Fitzgerald sets out to supersede Fleming's painfully passé volume while integrating a mass of recent literature. Fitzgerald delivers more than a new synthesis, however. Boldly postrevisionist in its interpretation, Reconstruction in Alabama offers nothing less than a new framework for understanding the period in the complicated cotton South. Throughout Reconstruction in Alabama, Fitzgerald stresses the centrality of factional politics and proto–New South economics, factors that he believes most historians of the period gloss over too readily. He grounds his analysis in antebellum Alabama, where white non-elites regularly confronted black belt [End Page 479] planters for power. When a mass of planters attempted to push Alabama out of the Union in 1861, Jacksonian Democrats from the northern Alabama hill country uncomfortably joined a growing handful of elite Whig conservatives to oppose the Confederacy. Wartime persecution, battlefield defeats, and brutal retaliation along the Tennessee River increased both Unionist numbers and their alienation from many of their white neighbors. Shared harassment never successfully welded these vying scalawag factions, and rivalry and class distrust endured. Unconditional Unionists from the hills particularly scorned wealthy latecomers, some of whom really did embrace the Union simply as a way to protect or rebuild personal fortunes. Race, in contrast, ironically provided a unifying element, as few white Alabama Republicans were antislavery or interested in the rights of postwar freedpeople except when they needed temporary allies. Instead, economic concerns such as railroads became uppermost to postwar GOP leaders and Alabama boosters. Class and prewar status likewise divided freedpeople, who in reality could only trust the United States Army during military occupation. Struggles over political rights and labor deepened as agricultural conditions worsened. Crop failures fatefully coincided with the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and black suffrage. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups rose up during hard times out of the violent tradition of antebellum patrollers and wartime guerrillas. Reconstruction was not an uninterrupted period of insurgent bloodletting, however. Challenging many scholars of the period, Fitzgerald stresses again and again that in most of Alabama, and notably in the black belt, a period of relative peace emerged in 1870. Ulysses S. Grant occupied the White House. Better prices for crops and cotton due to war in Europe, the Democrats' own deep divisions, and the "Liberal Republican movement" lowered the pressure (p. 263). White landowners and African American laborers needed each other and warily coexisted in hopes of all boats rising. Outside of the hills, where bloody ethnic cleansing continued, black people voted in relative safety and began increasing their demands, notably in the arena of civil rights. Reconstruction was working. But it was a "false dawn" (p. 257). The Amnesty Act of 1872, the devastating national depression in 1873, the subsequent collapse of the state's railroad bonds, a new round of local crop failures due to heavy rain, and civil rights legislation in Congress all combined to give...

Extending Recognition of Indigenous Burial Practices in Selomo v Doman 2014 JDR 0780 (LCC)

Burying deceased family members in familial gravesites close to the homestead of the living has been a well-established practice in Southern Africa for many centuries. In terms of indigenous cultural and religious norms proximate burials are essential for enabling ancestors to commune amongst themselves and with their living descendants. In the colonial and apartheid eras many African communities lost ownership of their land. One of the consequences was that they needed permission from white landowners to continue with burials in established gravesites. In the democratic era the legislature sought to reintroduce a burial right for rural black land occupiers. Section 6(2)(dA) of the Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997 allowed occupiers to assert a right of familial burial as against landowners, provided certain conditions were met. In Selomo v Doman 2014 JDR 0780 (LCC) Spilg J permitted a burial despite the fact that the applicant and deceased had not been resident near their family gravesite for many years. In our analysis of the judgment we suggest that the court’s attempts to find justification in the Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997 and the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act 3 of 1996 were misconstrued. With proximate familial burials being essentially a matter of respect for dignity and indigenous culture, the court should have engaged in a deeper analysis of constitutional rights.
 

You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta de Jong

Reviewed by: You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta de Jong Crystal R. Sanders (bio) You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement. By Greta de Jong. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. vii, 305. $34.95 cloth; $33.99 ebook) Greta de Jong's You Can't Eat Freedom is a tour de force of rural black southerners' lives after the passage of 1960s civil rights legislation. De Jong broadens the African American freedom struggle narrative by focusing on what happened in the plantation counties of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana after Jim Crow signs came down and federal voter registrars arrived. She shows that the hard-fought political achievements of the period did not bring about immediate meaningful changes in the lives of working-class African Americans because they lacked economic security. The fight for first-class citizenship coincided with agricultural mechanization, and white landowners fired black sharecroppers who challenged the racial status quo. Thus, the rural black antipoverty struggles of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were intricately connected to earlier civil rights struggles. The first chapter of You Can't Eat Freedom provides an overview [End Page 699] of the hardships black plantation workers faced as the agricultural economy shrunk after 1950. Non-farming employment was scarce because of racial discrimination, and no safety net existed for black workers. The social welfare system in these Black Belt counties was arbitrary and punitive. People rarely received the full amount of aid they were entitled to, and civil rights activists were denied assistance outright. In the first section, de Jong makes an important historiographical contribution to arguments about agricultural mechanization and modernization in the post–World War II period. According to de Jong, black displacement in the 1960s was not solely the inevitable outcome of workers whose labor had become expendable. Rather, it was the deliberate attempt on the part of white supremacists to foster the out-migration of a group whose population numbers posed a threat to the region's political status quo after the passage of voting rights. Leaving the South, however, was not a preferred option for many African Americans. Each of the subsequent seven chapters focuses on ways that African Americans responded to their displacement and bleak economic situation. The determination of black residents to stay in the only area they had ever known led to a variety of initiatives. In 1966, evicted sharecroppers took over an abandoned Air Force base in Mississippi in an attempt to pressure federal officials to act. They also championed the War on Poverty, which allowed the nation's poorest citizens to create solutions to local problems using federal funds. White state and county officials weakened the reach and success of such programs because they threatened their undemocratic political dominance. One of the rural black poor's most innovative and understudied responses to labor displacement was the creation of cooperatives. De Jong shows that community-owned businesses insulated their owners from economic exploitation, fostered economic independence, and undergirded the ongoing freedom movement. Those who had been evicted from plantations or lost their jobs because of their political work now had opportunities for employment outside of the local [End Page 700] white power structure. There were psychological benefits, too. Participation in black cooperatives "increased black farmers' confidence in their own abilities and gave them the freedom to make their own decisions" (p. 91). In some cases, such as that of the Southwest Alabama Farmer Cooperative Association, black southerners received funding and technical support from federal government agencies. Like the antipoverty programs, however, the cooperatives faced stiff opposition from white supremacists and wavering federal support. By the 1970s, the nation's political climate became antagonistic toward federal intervention in the economy. Beginning with the Nixon administration, the federal government retreated from its commitment to empowering the poor and decentralized antipoverty programs. De Jong convincingly asserts that the consequences of blind faith in market forces reverberated not just in the rural South but, also, throughout the nation. You Can't Eat Freedom is a must read for scholars interested in southern history, civil rights history, or...