By Our Hands Alone

INTRODUCTION

At the turn of the 20th century, the South was poor, rural, and underdeveloped, despite its rich resources and young population. Still recovering from the Civil War and overcommitted to growing cotton, the southern economy was entrenched in old patterns that hampered its ability to respond to economic opportunities.

One of the region's most debilitating patterns was the discrimination and intimidation practiced by many Southern whites towards blacks. Even though the Civil War ended slavery, blacks in the South faced new formal and informal efforts by whites to limit their rights and freedoms. These laws and attitudes kept blacks in a position that was often little better than life during slavery and sometimes worse. After the Civil War, most Southern blacks worked as laborers or sharecroppers on rural farms and had little hope to get ahead or to escape racism and discrimination. For many, the solution to this problem meant leaving rural farms and the South for the promise of jobs and better lives up North or out West.

Blacks were not the only Southerners mired in the cycle of backbreaking work and limited opportunities. Most white farmers in the South were also sharecroppers or tenant farmers. These individuals had little hope of owning their own land, escaping debts and backbreaking labor, or giving their children more opportunities. Although not subject to racial violence and legalized discrimination through Jim Crow laws, many poor whites recognized their best chance for prosperity lay beyond the cotton fields of the South and left. Between 1910 and 1960, nine million rural Southerners would leave the farms for opportunities in towns and cities.

This rural exodus worried leaders in the South and in Washington. The rural agricultural economy of the South could not survive without a large labor force to work in the cotton fields. Leaders across the nation, including President Teddy Roosevelt and Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia, began to look for ways to make farm life more attractive and profitable. In 1914, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act to establish the Cooperative Extension Service, which demonstrated scientific approaches to farming and household management for rural families. The extension service was an important source of support and advice for rural farmers; however, this assistance alone could not overcome the cycle of poverty faced by many rural farm families and it did not change the inequities faced by most black families living and working in rural areas.

By the late 1920s, years of low cotton prices compounded with the widespread destruction of cotton crops by the boll weevil and a severe drought in 1925 pushed many southern farm families to the very edge of their resources. Many found ways to persevere and survive while still dreaming of a day when life on the farm would finally afford them a decent living without killing them in the process.