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During the first half of the twentieth century, degradation,
poverty, and hopelessness were commonplace for African Americans
who lived in the South's countryside, either on farms or in rural
communities. Many southern blacks sought relief from these
conditions by migrating to urban centers. Many others, however,
continued to live in rural areas. Scholars of African American
rural history in the South have been concerned primarily with the
experience of blacks as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, textile
workers, and miners. Less attention has been given to other
aspects of the rural African American experience during the early
twentieth century.
African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950 provides important new information about African American culture, social life, and religion, as well as economics, federal policy, migration, and civil rights. The essays particularly emphasize the efforts of African Americans to negotiate the white world in the southern countryside.
Filling a void in southern studies, this outstanding collection provides a substantive overview of the subject. Scholars, students, and teachers of African American, southern, agricultural, and rural history will find this work invaluable.
About the Editor
R. Douglas Hurt is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Agricultural History and Rural Studies at Iowa State University in Ames. He is the author of numerous books, including Nathan Boone and the American Frontier and Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie, both available from the University of Missouri Press.
Contents
Introduction
Douglas Hurt
"Looking for Better All the Time": Rural Migration and
Urbanization in the South, 1900–1950
Louis M. Kyriakoudes
"A Crude and Raw Past": Work, Folklife, and Anti-Agrarianism in
Twentieth-Century African American Autobiography
Ted Ownby
"Of the Least and the Most": The African American Rural
Church
Lois Myers and Rebecca Sharpless
Shifting Boundaries: Race Relations in the Rural Jim Crow
South
Melissa Walker
African American Rural Culture, 1900–1950
Valerie Grim
Benign Public Policies, Malignant Consequences, and the Demise of
African American Agriculture
William P. Browne
"I Have Been through Fire": Black Agricultural Extension Agents
and the Politics of Negotiation
Jeannie Whayne
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: African American Strategies for Day-to-
Day Existence/Resistance in the Early-Twentieth-Century Rural
South
Peter Coclanis and Bryant Simon