The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and the White Families in the Jim Crow South

Review of: "The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and the White Families in the Jim Crow South," by Katherine van Wormer, David W. Jackson III, and Charletta Suddut

Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless: the WPA Interviews With Former Slaves Living in Indiana

Review of: Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless: The WPA Interviews with Former Slaves Living in Indiana. Baker, Ronald L

Black farm families in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: a study of the Brooks Farm Community, 1920-1970

This is a study of a black farm community called Brooks Farm. The research was designed to examine the total experience of Brooks Farm residents. The Brooks Farm community is located in Drew, Mississippi, a small rural town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. This study covers a period of fifty years, 1920-1970, in order to show changes that occurred in the community. The Brooks Farm community was formerly established as a plantation during the 1920s. It became the only plantation in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta that evolved into a community of black landowners during the 1940s. Brooks Farm was created by a wealthy white Virginian named Palmer Herbert Brooks, the man for whom the community was named;The dissertation utilizes primary and secondary sources, especially research collected from fifty residents who agreed to participate in this study. It shows how residents in the Brooks Farm community used their resources and energies to found and manage their schools and churches as well as to create Jobs within the community. This research provides analyses on landownership and land tenure, migration, housing, health and medical care, food and nutrition, family life, role of women, impact of technology, labor, mechanization, and the significance of the church and school. In essence, it is a social, economic, and cultural study that analyzes family and community life from the vantage point of the people;The research presented in this dissertation shows that Brooks Farm residents succeeded in developing their community. They adopted community enhancement values, implemented progressive programs and ideologies, developed a rural economy, and established support networks that were essential for community development

African Americans and Land Loss in Texas: Government Duplicity and Discrimination Based on Race and Class

African American Farmers and Land Loss in Texas, surveys the ways that discrimination at the local, state, and national levels constrained minority farmers during the twentieth century. It considers the characteristics of small-scale farming that created liabilities for landowners regardless of race, including state and federal programs that favored commercial and agribusiness interests. In addition to economic challenges African American farmers had to negotiate racism in the Jim Crow South. The Texas Agricultural Extension Service, the state branch of the USDA\u27s Extension Service, segregated in 1915. The Negro division gave black farmers access to information about USDA programs, but it emphasized their subordinate position relative to white farmers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not reverse decades of racial discrimination. Instead, USDA officials relied on federalism, a theory as old as the Constitution, to justify their tolerance of civil rights violations in Texas and elsewhere. Then, special needs legislation passed during the 1970s and 1980s did not realize its potential to serve ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged rural Texans. Discrimination based on race combined with a bias toward commercial production. This crippled most black farmers and led to their near extinction

Black farm families in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: a study of the Brooks Farm Community, 1920-1970

This is a study of a black farm community called Brooks Farm. The research was designed to examine the total experience of Brooks Farm residents. The Brooks Farm community is located in Drew, Mississippi, a small rural town in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. This study covers a period of fifty years, 1920-1970, in order to show changes that occurred in the community. The Brooks Farm community was formerly established as a plantation during the 1920s. It became the only plantation in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta that evolved into a community of black landowners during the 1940s. Brooks Farm was created by a wealthy white Virginian named Palmer Herbert Brooks, the man for whom the community was named;The dissertation utilizes primary and secondary sources, especially research collected from fifty residents who agreed to participate in this study. It shows how residents in the Brooks Farm community used their resources and energies to found and manage their schools and churches as well as to create Jobs within the community. This research provides analyses on landownership and land tenure, migration, housing, health and medical care, food and nutrition, family life, role of women, impact of technology, labor, mechanization, and the significance of the church and school. In essence, it is a social, economic, and cultural study that analyzes family and community life from the vantage point of the people;The research presented in this dissertation shows that Brooks Farm residents succeeded in developing their community. They adopted community enhancement values, implemented progressive programs and ideologies, developed a rural economy, and established support networks that were essential for community development.</p

The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and the White Families in the Jim Crow South

Review of: "The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and the White Families in the Jim Crow South," by Katherine van Wormer, David W. Jackson III, and Charletta Suddut

Sustaining A Rural Black Farming Community in the South A Portrait of Brooks Farm, Mississippi

The rural South has long been, for Blacks especially, a place characterized by declining agricultural opportunities, diminishing numbers of land owners, limited education and employment, few government services, continuous outmigration, and persistent poverty for many who remain. Nevertheless, not all communities suffering from these conditions have abandoned hope. Some have drawn on the strength of their own traditional institutions to sustain and even rebuild community life. Members of the Brooks Farm community, in the face of declining population and resources, have continued to provide services from within the community. At the same time, they have learned new ways to organize to secure services the community cannot provide for itself