RE-ENTERING AFRICAN-AMERICAN FARMERS: RECENT TRENDS AND A POLICY RATIONALE

Today, there are only about 15,000 black farmers in the United States. Declining by 98 percent since 1920, black farmers have suffered losses attributable to public policy, economic pressures, and racial oppression. All of these factors must be addressed if African-American farmers are to survive. In this paper, we use Census of Agriculture data and a follow-on survey in one Mississippi Delta county to review the current situation of black farmers. We introduce the concept of "re-entering farmers" to suggest that a significant number of black farmers, who are not defined as "farmers" by the Census, still own land and want to farm again. The first section of the paper provides a brief overview of the historical and current trends of black farmers in the United States. The second section discusses Delta County, drawing upon our survey and the Census of Agriculture. The third section discusses the implications of civil rights violations by the former Farmers Home Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Finally, we conclude with a policy recommendation to slow the drastic decline of African-American farmers.Afro-American farmers--Mississippi, Land use, Rural--Mississippi, Afro-American farmers--Civil rights--United States, Afro-American farmers--Government policy--United States, Agriculture and state--United States, Farms, Size of--Southern States, Discrimination in financial services--United States, Agrarian structure--United States--Southern States, Farm Management, Labor and Human Capital, Land Economics/Use,

History as Community-Based Research and the Pedagogy of Discovery: Teaching Racial Inequality, Documenting Local History, and Building Links Between Students and Communities in Mississippi and Tennessee

In this article we describe the process of implementing a community-based research project that linked student learning with documenting elements of local histories surrounding the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Tennessee. We show that developing a dialogue among community members, ourselves, and our students worked to democratize the research project, produce strong support among the community members, and contribute to an improved understanding of racial inequality for our students. We rely on our accounts of the process, student journals, and oral histories compiled during the research. Our findings show that there are considerable opportunities for community-based research around documenting and sharing key memories and that these can be realized even when the priorities between researchers and community members do not align. Our historically-oriented fieldwork, research, and findings serve to link service-learning to community-based research

Natural Degradation of Earthworks, Trenches, Walls and Moats, Northern Thailand

“………..structures of this kind are hidden away securely under the thick overgrowth: thus does nature preserve what man would surely destroy” (from Sumet Jumsai, 1970) We investigate the geometry, age, and history of several enigmatic northern Thailand earthwork entrenchments that are mostly located on hills and could not have held water to form moats. The earthworks are either oval or rectangular in map view; and they typically encircle 0.3-to-1-km2 areas that do not have potsherd debris indicative of former towns. Most trenches are 3-5 m deep with inner walls 4.5-8 m high. Some encircling earthworks are concentric double trenches spaced approximately 10 m apart. Historians have suggested these earthworks enclosed defensible areas where people in outlying villages sought refuge when under attack by neighboring rulers, the Chinese Ho, or the Burmese. We believe that some encircling entrenchments may have been for the capture or containment of elephants. Nearly all of the once near-vertical original walls have degraded to slopes of 32-47°. Fitting calculated curves of the diffusion-based scarp-degradation model to our height-slope data, and assuming most scarps have degraded since the end of La Na Kingdom time A.D. 1558. We derive a diffusion coefficient of 0.002 m2 y-1. Slopes of the rectangular earthwork at Souvannkhomkham, Laos, across the Mekong River from Chiang Saen Noi, are significantly more degraded (approximately 32°), indicating an age of 800-1200 years. Locations of these earthworks are established in hope that they will be preserved as part of the Thai and Lao archaeological legacy

Ceramics and Socio-Economic Statues of the Green Family, Windsor, Vermont

No abstract available at this time

Floodplain Deposits, Channel Changes and Riverbank Stratigraphy of the Mekong River Area at the 14th-Century City of Chiang Saen, Northern Thailand.

Riverbank stratigraphy and paleochannel patterns of the Mekong River at Chiang Saen provide a geoarchaeological framework to explore for evidence of Neolithic, Bronze-age, AD 5th Century Yonok and AD 14-16th Century Lan Na Cultures. Typical bank stratigraphy charted on the Thailand side is imbricate cobble gravel overlain by 5-10 m of reddish-brown sandy silt. The silt section is composed chiefly of ½ to 2-m thick layers of massive silt without paleosols interpreted as near-channel floodplain and gently-inclined levee deposits laid down by episodic, infrequent, large floods. The surface soil is dark-brown clay loam (La Na time. Brick ruins of 14-16th Century Buddhist temples are crumbling into the river at Chiang Saen Noi, and formerly did so at Chiang Saen until banks were stabilized by rock walls. Bank retreat from river erosion has been \u3e20 m since La Na time, and has exposed a siltfilled moat. A radiocarbon age of 1475 cal yr AD was obtained from charcoal at the bottom of the moat, beneath 5.6 m of silt. Lag material from erosion of the silt banks contains Neolithic and Bronze Age artifacts out of stratigraphic context, as well as ceramics and bricks of La Na age. These artifacts as well Neolithic artifacts obtained from a 1972 excavation near the mouth of the Kham River indicate long human habitation of this riverbank area. In northern Thailand the Mekong is mostly in a bedrock canyon, but shifting topography along the active strike-slip Mae Chan fault has formed the upstream 2-5-km wide floodplain at Chiang Saen, and downstream has diverted the river into a broad S-shaped loop in the otherwise straight course of the river. A 1.7-Ma basalt within the bedrock channel 45-km downstream of Chiang Saen indicates little vertical incision by the river. Satellite images show former channels in the Chiang Saen area, meander-point-bar scrolls (radii of curvature \u3e 1.2 km), and floodplain edges as arcuate cuts of similar curvature into the saprolite-mantled bedrock hills These features indicate channel avulsion occurred by meander loop cutoff in the past. Brick Buddhist monuments of the 14th-16th Century were built upon the floodplain with meander features on the Thai and Laos side of the river, indicating that these meandering channel features and the broader floodplain are mostly older than 600 years

Grass Tops Democracy: Institutional Discrimination in the Civil Rights Violations of Black Farmers

Abstract In this article Spencer D. Wood and Cheryl R. Ragar situate the civil rights violations of the Pigford v. Glickman, USDA lawsuit within a larger intersecting system of land, racial inequality and White normativity. Wood and Ragar show how land as a material basis of wealth has been disproportionately inaccessible to African Americans while simultaneously serving as a key form of wealth for upward mobility for White Americans. Discrimination on the part of the US Department of Agriculture has perpetuated and in many cases worsened the inequalities of access to land ownership between Blacks and Whites. The authors sketch out a connecting thread from Black landownership efforts in the mid-1930s through the class-action Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit with particular attention paid to the Consent Decree issued in 1999, and to the current administration's and 2008 farm bill efforts to remedy racial inequality in USDA programs. The primary focus of the article is to show how discrimination in access to operating credit fits within a larger institutional context of deprivation and oppression decreasing the likelihood of developing satisfactory injunction for the thousands of Black farmers who suffered at the hands of our public institutions. 16 The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.5, no.6, September 2012 Thus, the authors begin with an overview of one family's travails with the USDA then provide a brief background that introduces the Pigford case and frames the patterns of discrimination as learned behaviors within institutional contexts. They then discuss the community of Tillery and the Grant family, the Pigford Case and the Consent Decree, and last the hopeful changes embodied in the Obama administration and the 2008 Farm Bill. Finally, the authors conclude that the "grass tops" implementation of federal policy at local levels leaves too much room for the construction and maintenance of White spaces that reproduce systematic racial inequality in rural America

Solvent Exfoliation of Electronic-Grade, Two-Dimensional Black Phosphorus

Solution dispersions of two-dimensional (2D) black phosphorus (BP), often referred to as phosphorene, are achieved by solvent exfoliation. These pristine, electronic-grade BP dispersions are produced with anhydrous, organic solvents in a sealed tip ultrasonication system, which circumvents BP degradation that would otherwise occur via solvated oxygen or water. Among conventional solvents, n-methyl-pyrrolidone (NMP) is found to provide stable, highly concentrated (~0.4 mg/mL) BP dispersions. Atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy show that the structure and chemistry of solvent-exfoliated BP nanosheets are comparable to mechanically exfoliated BP flakes. Additionally, residual NMP from the liquid-phase processing suppresses the rate of BP oxidation in ambient conditions. Solvent-exfoliated BP nanosheet field-effect transistors (FETs) exhibit ambipolar behavior with current on/off ratios and mobilities up to ~10000 and ~50 cm^2/(V*s), respectively. Overall, this study shows that stable, highly concentrated, electronic-grade 2D BP dispersions can be realized by scalable solvent exfoliation, thereby presenting opportunities for large-area, high-performance BP device applications.Comment: 6 figures, 31 pages, including supporting informatio

Black Agrarianism: The Significance of African American Landownership in the Rural South

Agrarianism is important in the American mythos. Land represents both a set of values and a store of wealth. In this article, we ask how land matters in the lives of rural, southern, Black farmland owners. Drawing on 34 interviews, we argue that, since the end of slavery, land has continued to operate as a site of racialized exclusion. Local white elites limit Black farmers’ access to landownership through discriminatory lending practices. At the same time, Black farmland owners articulate an ethos in which land is a source of freedom, pride, and belonging. This we term “Black agrarianism.” They cultivate resistance to the legacies of slavery and sharecropping and contemporary practices of social closure. These Black farmland owners, then, view land as protection from white domination. Thus, we demonstrate how landownership is a site for the re‐creation of racial hierarchy in the contemporary period while also offering the potential for resistance and emancipation.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146353/1/ruso12208_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146353/2/ruso12208.pd