Black Farmer, Erin New York, 1940. Already at the time of this photograph this farm was the only black owned farm in its area.
February has been declared to be Black History month. I disregard most such declarations as most of them came after this one and they increasingly have come to mean less and less. Indeed, they've always had a strong political aspect to them, but this has grown to be more the case as they've moved on and the appeal to whatever cause is being given a month is less and less broad. I don't feel this to be the case for Black History Month.
There are are few items up on this site that specifically relate to African American heritage, most specifically the examination of the history of blacks in the military. But I haven't looked at this topic, which is a really remarkable one.
Black farmers in Marshall, Texas, 1940.
For a long time, African Americans have represented about 10% of the U.S. population, but they were 14% of the farm population. Now they're 2%. That's a really remarkable decline. What occured is a legitimate question.
It may particularly be one if we stop to realize that African American association with agriculture was particularly strong, if particularly unwilling, early on. That is, almost all of the early African immigrants to North American were slaves, and almost all of them were slaves on farms with farming duties.
Indeed, that fact dominated both the early history of blacks in North America and agriculture in North America. American agriculture rapidly split into two types, one being yeoman farms owned by families that consumed, as a rule, the bulk of their own production and sold the surplus and the second being production "plantations" that were driven for market sales. A person who had the economic bent to history, perhaps a product of the University of Chicago or one of the members of the Marxist school of historical thought would tend to note, accordingly, that capitalism in American agriculture can be argued to have its roots in slavery, although that's drawing the point too fine and perhaps mischaracterising it. Still, plantations were production agriculture, which produced their own consumables of all types on the side. Regular farms, on the other hand, tended to be subsistence farms which sold their excess. People could and did become rich as yeoman farmers, which is important to note, and oddly enough planters, i.e., those who owned plantations, were usually so heavily in debt that their debts exceeded their assets. On a day to day basis, however, a planter was more likely to live the life of the genteel than any yeoman was, while the nature of the labor on the respective agricultural units were much more grueling for the actual laborers on a plantation.
It'd be temping just to write the history of blacks in American farming from there, but that would be inaccurate. Black slaves on southern farms principally learned farming as a trade and, moreover, they learned a lot about farming that an average yeoman wouldn't. Typical yeoman farms were multi production units driven towards family consumption and the finishing of a product was only partially market oriented. Yeomanry learned an incredibly diverse set of skills, but they weren't as diverse as those that existed on a plantation. For one thing, given the nature of plantations, they included subsistence farming in addition to production farming as the slaves were expected to feed themselves and their owners. Indeed, while rarely noted, slaves were typically lightly armed by their owners so that they could supplement their tables with small game, which saved the owner from having to slaughter production animals for their sake. Given all of this, slaves learned, by force of course, the same skills that yeomanry did in subsistence farming, but also learned production farming and for that matter the finishing of many agricultural products that plantations generated. In other words, the typical southern slave at the time of the American Revolution learned how to grow food plants, such as yams, onions and the like, but also learned how to harvest and mill grain, brew beer, harvest, cultivate, dry and process tobacco. Only that latter crop, at that time, was a production crop. In later years, of course, cotton would be added, which wasn't processed locally, and which is a legendarily back breaking crop to cultivate and harvest. Indeed, the labor is so great that it was cotton that kept American slavery from passing away in the early 19th Century and which accordingly lead to the Civil War.
Anyhow, with that background its tempting to suppose that as soon ast he Union Army came through that slaves took off for the North, but they didn't. The United States was overwhelmingly agricultural in the 1860s and yeomanry was every bit the factor in the North that it was in the South. The real difference was that in the South the yeoman class, which made up the overwhelming majority of hte population, was poorer than it was in the North, which was itself a byproduct of slavery.
Freed slaves wanted to become freeholders. The dream of early liberated slaves was to own "40 acres and a mule", the American Agrarian equivalent of Chesterton's later Distributist "3 acres and a cow". 40 acres of land meant freedom and self sufficiency and the American black population, cultivating American ground since 1619, was well aware of that. The Radical Republican thought was to bust up the plantations and distribute the ground, Emiliano Zapata style, to those who worked it.
It should have been done.
The fact that it wasn't done provides the beginning of the answer to the question posed above. African Americans were overwhelmingly farmers in 1865 and they lacked the means to purchase farms or move for the most part. Some who had them moved, and already by the late 1860s black cowboys, recently freed men who had driven cattle in the forests of the south, were a prominent feature in Western ranching. But the fact of the matter was that for the most part blacks couldn't purchase ground. They had to hire themselves out, and in hiring themselves out, they were guaranteed to be required to work for the lowest wages possible, often in conditions that mimicked slavery.
Over time, those who could did purchase ground and many became tenant farmers, or sharecroppers. Black sharecroppers became a major feature of the South, but in fairness black farmers did as well. They were always outnumbered by white farmers to be sure, but they were a definite presence throughout the South and even spread into other regions. The number of acres owned by black farmers in the United States was 3,000,000 acres. By 1900, it was 12,000,000.
After 1890, however, some significant changes in the US began that would reverse the trend. By 1890 the nation's transportation infrastructure had advanced to where moving long distance had become much easier. At the same time the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s had caused blacks to steadily lose rights in the South after that time on a year by year basis. By the 1890s it was becoming very notable and the first strong efforts to push back started to occur. Those early efforts weren't successful however and African Americans simply began to pull up stakes and move from Southern farms to northern cities.
Map showing concentration of African American population in the United States in 1900.
What began as a trickle in in the 1890s expanded to a flood in the mid 1910s. As a black population base formed in northern cities, African Americans who were sick of the prejudice and poverty they faced in the South left for the north and left agriculture behind them. The process continued on all the way into the 1970s.
As this occurred, the relief laws of the Great Depression came into and accelerated the decline in black farming. Much Southern farm land remained owned by descendants of the planter class who leased it out to black sharecroppers. In an effort to arrest the deflation of agricultural products the US government encouraged farmers to plow crops under and idle land giving no thought to the fact that, in much of the South, the land being idled was farmed by one person and owned by another. Planters participated in the Government' idling of their land and benefited economically by doing so. Sharecroppers simply lost their livelihoods.
Combined with all of this is the decline in the number of farmers in general, something American society, which is welded to the concept of market forces being benighted, has done nothing to arrest.
The overall result has been a sort of tragedy, particularly if you regard farming as having a special merit in and of itself, as we do. Beyond that, which we won't go into but which is part of the mysticism of the agrarian ideal, African American culture had particularly strong roots in agriculture, with not all of those roots being exclusively one of oppression. Even well into the Great Migration much of the odds and ends of African American culture in the United States, from food to music, had really deep agricultural roots. That's effectively been lost with the loss of African Americans to farming.
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