Share Cropping in the Delta
I
A FEW months ago some of the newspapers and magazines of the country carried a startling photograph of a plump, middle-aged woman holding her skirts high above her knees. On her white thigh flowered a great black bruise. The woman, identified as ‘Miss Willie Sue Blagden, socialite and social worker of Memphis,’ said that she had been flogged by cotton farmers near Earl, Arkansas, because of her presumed sympathies with the aims and activities of the Southern Farm Tenants’ Union.
For two years the Arkansas Delta — an area of large cotton plantations — has been the scene of conflict between farmers and agents of the Union who have sought to organize share-croppers and obtain higher wages and shorter hours for farm laborers. There have been actual and alleged floggings of the Union’s agents. Some have been put in jail. Others have been run out of the community. There have been on both sides the bitter charges usual in labor conflicts; shots fired at midnight; espionage; lawsuits; investigations by the press; newsreel pictures; radio talks; and, lately, the injection into the fray of the United Mine Workers, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, as an ally of the Union. Norman Thomas was forcibly prevented by farmers from addressing share-croppers at Birdsong, Arkansas. A government report was made on the situation, but it has never been released. So-called liberal publications in the North have treated of conditions in the cotton fields of Arkansas in the language and temper of the Abolitionists of Boston in 1858. Conservative newspapers in the South have dismissed the work of the Union as the ‘efforts of paid Communist agitators.’
It is impossible within the limits of this article to consider the manifold complexities of share-cropping even within a limited region. A complete consideration would involve questions of taxes, interest, the price the farmer receives for cotton, the prices he pays for the things he buys, the immense amount of hand labor essential to growing cotton, export markets, tariffs, competition with foreign cotton growers, and the extraordinary difficulties of the race question. This discussion is limited, therefore, to a consideration merely of some phases of the sharecropping system as it is practised in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. These sections are so similar in every respect that they may be considered as one. For purposes of brevity they will be alluded to as the Delta.
This area is a land of large plantations. The soil is perhaps the richest in the world, having been built up through countless ages by alluvial deposits of the Mississippi River and by the decay of leaf mould from the dense forest that covered it. It is deep, flat, free of rocks or stones, blessed with abundant sun and rain, and fabulously fertile. The cotton yield is about three times higher than the average for the South, and the staple grown is of such high quality that it commands a special price premium in the markets of the world.
The Delta is a country of blazing suns, torrential rains, and heavy dews; of the great river and many lesser rivers; of dark snake-infested swamps, loud with the croakings of frogs and the lonely cries of owls; of green storm clouds scudding above green fields, and tumbled masses of cumulus clouds flecked with the black of buzzards’ wings; of white glaring summers and purple-tinted autumns; of tiny cabins lost on the vast plains; of mules and Negroes and endless turnrows and singing voices praising the tenderness of sweet Jesus, who one day will enfold all of God’s creatures in His arms.
It is a land, too, of peace and savage violence; of swift changes from prosperity to poverty; of churchgoing and whiskey drinking; of kindness and cruelty; of hard work and prodigal leisure; of hospitality and feudalism; of good manners and isolation.
Cotton is the single money crop, and cotton growing is more than a way of earning a living. It is a form almost of religion. The Delta farmer does not desire to make more money in order, like the Iowa farmer, to retire to California, but in order to buy more land to grow more cotton. Sometimes this desire becomes a pathological obsession; always it is deep within the blood.
There are relatively few white sharecroppers in the Delta, but their numbers are growing. Year by year they come down from their sterile hills, attracted by the rich lands of the Delta. These share-croppers are of pure AngloSaxon stock, Protestant, ignorant, poor, violent, difficult to deal with, fanatically religious, and filled with a blazing hatred for Negroes and upper-class whites. They are not wanted now in the Delta, as they were not wanted on the large plantations of the South prior to the Civil War. None the less, they continue to filter in, and as their numbers increase new problems will be created. There is an essential conflict of temperament and point of view between these people and the landowning whites of the Delta, and the conflict is especially bitter between poor whites and Negroes. It is to be observed that this conflict does not prevail in the case of non-Anglo-Saxon white share-croppers, such as Italians or Scandinavians. These are welcomed both by the planters and by the Negroes.
II
Negroes constitute a vast majority of the population of the Delta, averaging about 70 per cent of the whole. They are, with some exceptions, ignorant, superstitious, given to magic and outbursts of violence, cheerful, patient, thriftless, teeming with sexual diseases, suspicious of both whites and blacks, orgiastically religious, and completely amoral.
The Delta Negro pays lip service to the Christianity of the white folks, but the tribal gods of magic claim his deepest devotion. Negro hoodoo doctors ply their profession in the towns, and their clientele is large among the blacks there as well as on the plantations. If business is bad, a doctor may sometimes take to the road in search of clients, and recently one of them came to Trail Lake Plantation. He went into the mule lot where Galley, the hostler, was at work.
‘Good mawnin’,’ said the doctor. ‘How is you, Galley?’
‘How you know my name?’ inquired the hostler. ‘I ain’t never seed you befo’. You’s strange aroun’ here.’
‘Humph!’ snorted the doctor. ‘How I know yo’ name? It ain’t nuthin’ I does n’t know.’ He looked cautiously around the lot. Then he whispered in Galley’s ear: ‘I’se a two-headed man.’
‘Is you?’ said Galley, looking at him suspiciously. ‘If you is, how come you wearing overhalls like a plain field nigger?’
‘Nigger, ain’t you got no sense?’ replied the doctor. ‘If I was wearin’ my Sunday clothes de white folks might catch me and run me clean to Vicksburg. Dis way I’m jest a lonesome nigger looking for a job. Now what I wants to ax you is dis: has you got any money?’ Galley said that he had five dollars. ‘Well, den,’ resumed the doctor, ‘it ain’t nuthin’ for a two-headed man from Algiers like me to fix it up for you so soon’s you walk in de store Mr. Gay Coleman will come up to you widout no word on yo’ part and say, “Galley, does you want twenty-five dollars in cash or groceries?”’
The doctor got the five dollars and walked out of the mule lot, looking like a lonesome Negro hunting for a job. Galley sulked impatiently through the day until the mules had been brought to the lot at sundown. Then he went to the store. Mr. Gay Coleman was so busy weighing coffee and sugar for the coming Saturday business that he did not even glance at Galley. The hostler leaned against the counter and picked his teeth with a knife blade. He ate a can of sardine-fish with enormous deliberation and mental concentration. He bought a bottle of pop from Mr. Mac and drank it slowly, shaking the bottle before each swallow in order to create a bit of foam and thus prolong the time of drinking it. At nine o’clock, as Mr. Gay Coleman was preparing to close the store for the night, he seemed to become for the first time aware of the hostler’s existence. ‘Galley,’ he said, ‘tell all the niggers at the lot to be here first thing in the morning to get their second typhoid shot when Dr. Shackleford comes out from town.’
‘Yassuh,’ replied Galley. The store doors closed. Galley walked sadly down the big road in the white moonlight stirring tiny clouds of dust with his shuffling feet.
Family life, in the sense that white men know it, is almost nonexistent among rural Delta Negroes. A man ‘marries’ a woman simply by living with her. He divorces her merely by leaving her. Customs die hard. Not long ago, on Deep Snow plantation, a young Negro girl came to tell her grandmother that she was going to get married with a courthouse license, a preacher, a ring bearer, and all the rest, just like the white folks. The old woman snorted in disgust. ‘Is you chillun done gone crazy?’ she asked. ‘Me and yo’ grandpappy made us first crop together fifty years ago, and us ain’t never had no cote-house license, neither a ring bearer. Us made many a crop an’ fit many a time an’ loved each other good and he ain’t never had no other ’oman, neither I another man. You don’t need no highfalutin’ cotehouse license. Dat’s for white folks. Jes’ git you a good strong nigger an’ go ’head ’bout yo’ business.’
A single household may contain five or six children born of various mothers and fathers, yet all dwell in peace. Rural Negroes are fond of children and treat them with great kindness. Negro orphans are unknown; they are gladly adopted by friends or relatives.
The Delta Negro’s sex life is a long moral holiday. He is bound by no conventions and circumscribed by no laws. He is sexually free and untrammeled and has a maxim which pithily expresses his point of view about physical love: ‘It’s good; I likes it, and I’m gwine to git me some mo’ of it.’
He is, however, sometimes savagely jealous, and is then swift to kill. Every cabin contains one or more rifles, pistols, or shotguns, and the women, who are as deadly as the men, carry ice picks which they use with unerring accuracy. Murders and assaults are so common among plantation Negroes that they arouse only passing comment among the whites and are simply the subject of excited gossip for a day or two among Negroes. Recently a Negro woman walked up the road on Bridal Wreath plantation with her four children. Her husband walked rapidly behind her, swinging an axe. He caught up with her, forced her to kneel on the road, and severed her head from her body. Then he stood by quietly until the plantation manager came to take him to jail. Why had he killed the woman? ‘She was talking under her clothes wid dat harp-blowing nigger from Rolling Fork.’ If the murderer goes to the penitentiary it will be only for a short term. When he is released he will take his place in the community without loss of prestige and with an aura of heroism and adventure about him.
The Delta Negro, with few exceptions, is utterly thriftless. Yesterday is vaguely remembered. To-day is bright reality. To-morrow may never come. It is for white folks whose lives in the present are poisoned by forebodings of the morrow to burden themselves with insurance and pensions and old-age security legislation. For the Negro, tomorrow is merely an atom of time which some day will burst in a magnificent multicolored explosion, revealing sweet Jesus on His throne. And, because there is no future, it is utterly senseless to save money for it. Money is acquired to spend — not to save. At ‘settlement time’ in November or December, when croppers receive their share of the proceeds of the cotton crop, most of them immediately spend the fruits of a year’s labor on secondhand automobiles, gasoline, gambling, whiskey, or aimlessly and gayly traveling about the countryside. They will buy anything that is offered for sale, however useless, ranging from pianos to sets of gold teeth, sometimes diamondencrusted. Then they will go along with little or no money for the next nine months, secure in their belief that the white man will somehow provide for them.
The curse of the white man’s relations with the Delta Negro is not his alleged brutality, — a charge which is rarely true, — but his paternalism. The paternalism of the Delta planter is a surviving remnant of ante-bellum noblesse oblige, plus his profound belief that the Negro is a helpless and amusing child. The planter does not insist that the Negro stand on his own feet. He does not condemn him to starvation or nakedness if he fails to measure up to the stern standards of competition that exist among whites. When times are hard, the first thought of a harassed planter is to borrow money ‘to take care of my niggers.’ If a Negro gambles away in a night his earnings of a year and must be supported for nine months, the planter curses him with magnificent fury and picturesqueness. He swears that he will let him starve and lie naked to the winds of winter. He tells him that he is the most no-’count, jugheaded, trifling nigger that ain’t got the sense of a mule, and hanging is far too good for him. The Negro humbly bows his head and looks the picture of sorrowful repentance. But when he leaves the planter’s store he goes out with a sack or two of corn meal and a slab of salt meat, slings them over the rump of his mud-bespattered mule, and rides cheerfully homeward.
If the Delta Negro ever had a desire to stand on his own feet, it has been utterly sapped by the paternalism of the whites. This attitude — springing largely from motives of kindness — has been extremely costly both materially and spiritually to the whites and the Negroes of the region. It is merciful in that it evades the horrors of the dog-eat-dog attitude sometimes prevailing in the industrial regions. But if the rural Negro is ever to arrive at economic manhood he must learn to forgo the soft pleasures of paternalism.
The Delta Negro is amazingly cheerful in adversity and patient in misfortune. He knows how to laugh. Negro laughter is quite unlike white laughter. ‘I teaches my children to laugh,’ said a wise old Negro schoolteacher to me. ‘ Long as they can laugh they ’ll get along all right.’ Cheerfulness, patience, and good humor are qualities which are a vital part of the Negro’s genius for survival, and without them he would long ago have vanished. Living in a dominant white society, hedged about with numerous taboos, subject to unwritten and unwritable conventions imposed by the whites, he quickly learns how to assay the white man. He knows instinctively who is weak and who firm; who is determined and who vacillating; who is kind and who cruel. Living in an alien world dominated economically and socially by the whites, the Negro learns in childhood to read them almost at a glance, and to adapt himself with the fluidity of water to the personality with which he is momentarily in contact.
Delta Negroes are a people without a culture. This is readily understandable in the light of their American experience. Negroes came to this country with many African cultures. They were sold as slaves and dispersed. On antebellum plantations they often could not converse with each other until they had acquired English as a common tongue. Their blood was mixed with the blood of blacks from every part of Africa and whites of every kind from every part of the United States. Long ago they lost their tribal cultures. They have now no memories of their homeland; no native crafts or arts. They have not acquired the culture of the whites, but merely ape their worst qualities. And, as the actions of the leaders and the people of half the world prove, the white man at his worst outdoes any other man in barbarism and brutality.
III
White farmers of the Delta are in origin roughly of two kinds: those who are descendants of ante-bellum slave owners, and those who are descendants of overseers, artisans, and small landowners. The former tend to treat Negroes with every consideration of fairness; the latter are likely to be harsh and unfair to Negroes.
The social structure of the Delta, so far as share-cropping is concerned, is composed of the following elements: —
(a) White farmers descended from slave owners.
(b) White farmers whose grandfathers and fathers were overseers for slave owners or for their sons, or else were store managers or artisans.
(c) White share-croppers. They are a minority in the Delta and are filled with a bitter hatred for upper-class whites and for Negroes.
(d) Negro landowners. Thousands of acres of land are owned by Negro farmers who in turn have Negro sharecroppers upon their land. These croppers complain of their exploitation at the hands of their richer brothers.
(e) Negro share-croppers. They have an immense contempt and scorn for white share-croppers, whom they call ‘po’ white trash.’ They do not trust any man, white or Negro.
It remains to be inquired: What is share-cropping? How does it function?
The share-cropping relationship commonly comes about in this way. At any time between November and February a Negro, hat in hand, will enter the office of a farmer in his plantation store. He would like to ‘take up some land.’ The farmer makes a few inquiries about his prior abodes, the size of his family, and whether he has any mules or tools.
Usually the applicant has nothing to offer save the labor of himself and his family. His possessions consist of a few clothes, some bedding and pieces of rickety furniture, a mail-order catalogue, a Bible (often illustrated with drawings of black angels seated at the foot of the white and dazzling throne of Jesus), a flea-bitten rabbit dog, a chromo of Daniel in the Lions’ Den, and a membership in a burial society.
The cropper (and his family) must be given shelter, food, clothing, and medical services from the time that he comes to the plantation — say, in November — until the following August, when cotton picking is started and money begins to come in. A deal is struck. It follows the pattern used since 1865. The farmer agrees to furnish without charge the following things: a cabin, fuel (to be cut by the cropper from the farmer’s woods), water, a garden patch, seed, mules, tools, and land for making a crop. He agrees also to furnish the cropper with food and clothing in stipulated amounts.
The cropper undertakes to cultivate the land under the farmer’s supervision; to turn over to him for rent half of the corn and cotton grown; and to repay the sums advanced in the form of food, clothing, and medical services. Whatever remains (if anything) is his net earnings for the year over and above his subsistence.
Share-cropping is essentially a partnership in which one partner provides the capital, the other provides the labor, and the profits (if any) are to be equally divided. Theoretically the cropper also shares the losses, but actually if he goes into debt he evades it simply by moving to another plantation at the end of the season. The planter does not sue him often because he cannot find him, and in any event a judgment against a penniless man would be worthless. If the cropper remains despite his debts, he may discharge them in whole or in part in succeeding years, they may be forgiven him, or he may, if conditions are unfavorable, go deeper into debt.
The parties to a share-cropping contract are, however, highly unequal. The planter is white, literate, intelligent, possessed of some means, and is a member of a dominant race. The cropper is (usually) black, illiterate, unintelligent, poverty-stricken, and a member of a dominated race. The relationship presents great opportunities and temptations for fraud and exploitation on the part of the planter.
Many farmers are undoubtedly unable to resist the temptations to fleece their croppers. (It is indeed true of the white man everywhere in the world that he has often shamelessly robbed black and brown peoples of lesser strength.) During the depths of the depression, when cotton fell to five cents a pound, some planters laughingly said, ‘We must now start working our land instead of our niggers.’ A classical tale is sometimes told in the Delta of how a planter settled his accounts with a share-cropper.
The planter counted out $1400 in currency and put it upon his desk. It was the amount owing to Jimpson Johnson, a Negro cropper. He sent a messenger to fetch Jimpson to the store. While waiting for him the planter looked longingly at the little pile of money. ‘That’s too much for Jimpson,’ he said. ‘Too much for any nigger. He’d just go hog-wild if he had it.’ He put $200 in his pocket. Jimpson had not come. The planter looked at the money again. ‘Now you know,’ he said, talking to himself, ‘that nigger just naturally would n’t know how to spend $1200.’ He put $200 more in his pocket. Still Jimpson had not arrived. ‘Now there’s no sense in a nigger running around with $1000. If he does he’ll get in trouble sure’s you’re born,’ the planter said to himself, as he took $200 more off the stack of currency.
Then the cropper arrived. ‘Jimpson,’ the planter told him, ‘you made $800 this year.’ ‘Yassuh,’ Jimpson replied. ‘Us is halvers, so you take yo’ $400 and gimme mine.’ The planter counted out $400 and gave Jimpson the remainder.
It is true, however, that not all farmers are exploiters of croppers any more than all bankers are dishonest, all judges are corrupt, or all legislators are takers of bribes. Delta farmers are merely as honest as are Americans in general, and by common consent of observers the treatment given sharecroppers has constantly improved during the past fifteen years. None the less it cannot be denied that the very nature of the share-cropping relationship presents great opportunities for fraud.
On the other hand, the cropper is not always virtuous merely because he is poor. He has his own little ways. He is often not above stealing cotton, corn, pigs, chickens, or anything that is movable. To the plantation Negro, stealing from the white man is merely a method of restoring somewhat the balance of property between himself and the planter, whom he always regards as wealthy even if he is on the verge of bankruptcy. Or, in modern terminology, stealing from the rich by the poor is merely a way of distributing the wealth. Thefts of all kinds are so common on plantations that the risk of loss of property comes to be accepted as a minor hazard of agriculture. And these thefts arc directed as frequently by Negroes against other Negroes as against the whites.
Croppers often do not hesitate to leave the plantation without notice if they think that because of a poor crop or low prices they will not make any money. In such cases the farmer loses the money advanced to the cropper and is put to the additional expense of hiring others to cultivate the abandoned crop. Nor will the average cropper do an honest day’s work if he is not rigorously and unremittingly supervised. This despite the fact that he shares equally in a crop the size of which depends largely upon his own efforts. That is why plantation bells toll mournfully in the cool darkness before dawn; why the fields are continually overlooked by straw bosses and riding bosses (often Negroes); why the Negro does not acquire habits of work which would fit him to succeed as an independent farmer.
IV
The planter does not give the cropper cash with which to buy his monthly rations and clothing wherever he pleases. He gives him instead a ‘doodlum’ book, the coupons of which are accepted as money only at the plantation store. Critics of the share-cropping system charge that this is one of the many methods used by farmers to enslave croppers. In general the charge is untrue. If the cropper received cash each month during the growing season, all or most of it would be spent for gasoline, whiskey, women, and gambling. Yet he and his family must be clothed and fed, and the farmer out of self-interest is compelled to furnish food and clothing. The doodlum book forces the cropper to spend his money for necessaries, and keeps down his indebtedness to the planter, thereby eventually adding to his profits and reducing the planter’s risks. This system has the complete approval of Negro women, who with their children have often borne the burden of the males’ extravagance.
Critics of the system charge that croppers’ cabins are unfit for human habitation. This charge is in many cases true. A great many cabins are merely tumble-down shacks that are warrens rather than houses. Some of them leak so badly that Negroes say,‘It rains inside my house and leaks outside.’ Nor is it any defense of the indefensible to point out that millions of Americans live in dark and stinking tenements in the cities; in disgraceful shacks in industrial towns; and in comfortless, bleak houses on the farms.
It is to be noted that the cropper does not agree to pay a definite number of dollars as rent: say, two hundred dollars for twenty acres. He agrees merely to pay half of an unknown quantity of cotton worth an unknown price in the future. He may grow five bales or ten bales. Cotton may bring twenty-five dollars a bale (as in 1932) or sixty dollars a bale (as in 1935). Seed may sell for seven dollars a ton (as in 1932) or forty dollars a ton (as in 1935). The farmer cannot calculate his income in advance as he could if he received cash rent. His only certainty is outgo: so much for taxes, overhead, depreciation, mules, tools, advances to croppers, and so forth. He takes all the risks, but agrees to divide the profits (if any) with his croppers. If crops are good and prices are high, he will make money. If crops are poor and prices are low, he will not only lose money, but will often lose his plantation, if unfavorable conditions exist for two or more years. So many plantations have been lost to mortgagees in the past few years that banks and insurance companies are now among the largest cotton growers in the country.
What risk does the cropper take? As a partner of the farm, he must inevitably share with the farmer the hazards of agriculture and the vagaries of the market. When cotton drops to disastrously low prices, neither he nor the farmer can make money. ‘I never had nary a cent in 1932,’ a cropper told me, ‘and I et so much okra I slid out of bed.’ If crops are good and prices are high, croppers will and do make money.
Under any circumstances whatsoever, the cropper cannot, starve, cannot go naked, cannot be without shelter and medical services. He achieves complete economic security for one year at least, even if at a relatively low standard of living. This standard, however, he can improve by his own efforts in growing vegetables, keeping chickens, and raising hogs. If he does not do it, he has no one but himself to blame. Essentially, therefore, the cropper’s risk is that he will make little or no money or may even go into debt. But he will not be discharged without notice, as is common in industry, and he is not tortured by the industrial worker’s fear of losing his job.
During the growing season, the cropper and his family work hard. Their hours are, in Negroes’ terms, ‘from can to can’t.’ But the average cropper works on his own crop not more than one hundred and twenty days of the year. If he does odd jobs about the plantation, such as ditching, mending fences, or clearing land, he is paid in cash at the prevailing wage just as though he were an outside or transient laborer. Every cropper’s income is augmented by work of this kind. The startling fact is that he is the only common laborer in the United States who can earn his livelihood at any standard of living whatsoever by working only one third of the year.
Assuming that the cropper receives honest treatment, what factors militate against his rise to the eventual status of landowner?
(a) Low prices and poor crops. These are beyond the control both of himself and of the planter, with, however, this exception: some planters are more competent than others. Croppers on the land of the more competent planters will naturally fare better than those on the land of the less competent. So, too, stockholders of better-managed companies will usually get greater dividends than stockholders of poorly managed companies.
(b) The croppers’ thriftlessness. It is difficult for anyone who has not lived among Delta Negroes to comprehend their incredible lack of thrift. A tremendous crop was made in the Delta last year. The price was relatively high. Millions of dollars were paid to croppers in November and December, in amounts ranging from two hundred dollars to one thousand dollars or more. Before Christmas, nine families out of ten were penniless. The money went as quickly as it could be spent for bright trash, secondhand automobiles, whiskey, gambling, and riding the trains. The fruits of a year’s labor and the hopes of acquiring the status of an independent landowner were dissipated almost overnight.
There are, however, Negroes who are industrious, who do save, and who become landowners. Thousands of acres of Delta land are owned by this minority and they are among the best citizens of the counties in which they live. They have sound houses, barns, mules, tools, chickens, cows, fruit trees, hogs, and all the things that go to make a good life on a farm. But they are a tiny minority among the mass of their thriftless, pleasure-loving, careless-of-the-morrow fellows.
V
Share-cropping is far from being a perfect system either for the farmer or for the cropper. The high risks involved tend to make the farmer a gambler, and the enormous temptations for fraud that it presents break down the fibre of the spiritually weaker. Those farmers — and there are many of them — who are governed by noblesse oblige extend paternalism beyond sound business judgment and in so doing often go bankrupt. This paternalism, in turn, affects the cropper harmfully by sapping his strength and making him dependent upon the planter. Indeed, the very economic security that the system affords works against the Negro. It encourages him in his habits of thriftlessness, fortifies him in his well-founded belief that the white man will take care of him, and consequently deprives the weak majority of the will to rise to independent ownership.
It cannot be doubted that the national welfare would be promoted if thousands of croppers owned small tracts of land and lived in the tradition of the good life. In a recent letter to Senator Bankhead of Alabama, President Roosevelt wrote: —
Thoughtful people everywhere have been gravely concerned with the steady increase in farm tenancy from 1880 to 1935. . . . It has been an ideal of the American people that every American should have an ownership interest in land or in some other means of production. . . . An enduring agricultural civilization must be built on the firm foundation of home and farm ownership. Any long-time improvement of the welfare of the nation and of farm people involves improvement of the tenancy situation.
No one can deny the validity of the ideal which the President has stated. The difficulties of realizing it are, however, enormous. Thousands of croppers, both black and white, are at present unfitted for the responsibilities and cares of independent ownership. Acquiring land is much less difficult than holding it after it has been acquired. Successful small-farm ownership implies first of all a deep love of the land itself, such as marks the peasantry of France or Scandinavia. Our people, save in rare instances, have no such love of the land. Successful ownership, too, implies steady and continuous industry instead of short periods of intensive work and months of loafing. It implies thrift and thought of the morrow. It implies a sound family life and the will to remain in one place. These qualities are possessed by but few of the thousands of the landless tenants and share-croppers of the South. To say that they lack these qualities because they have never owned land is not to deny the fact that they must undergo a long period of physical and moral rehabilitation before they are fitted for the responsibilities of landownership. This fact is realized by the government. The Rural Resettlement Administration operates a large plantation in Arkansas known as the Dyess Colony, where nearly five hundred former sharecropper families live. The land has not been turned over to them. They are rigidly supervised by government agents. The colonists are merely being prepared for eventual ownership. No one knows how many years this will take. Nor does anyone know whether the colonists will be successful when the land becomes their own. Ownership of land is not in itself a guarantee of success any more than ownership of a business or a factory.
Share-cropping has continued for seventy years because no one has found a better system to take its place. No sudden change could safely take place within a capitalist democracy. Providing landownership for millions of landless and unprepared people is a vast and enormously complex problem. It is affected by many considerations. It is complicated by factors of race, ignorance, health, governmental regulation of agriculture, the progress of technology, the competition of foreigngrown cotton, and the intranational competition of crops.
It must be remembered that the Negro was ruthlessly delivered in 1862 into a freedom for which he was not prepared. And once the government had achieved the ideal of his freedom he was abandoned and forgotten. It must also be remembered that the growth of large plantations and of farm tenancy is not an isolated phenomenon. In industry the control of the instruments of production and of distribution has tended ever since the close of the Civil War to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Chain stores, great aggregations of factories owned and controlled from a single source, monopolies, trusts and holding companies, are making of the United States a nation of workmen and clerks. What has become of the local shoemaker? The tailor? The baker? The dressmaker? The cabinetmaker? The grocer? The druggist? If they survive at all it is because the great corporations making and distributing shoes, clothes, bread, dresses, furniture, groceries, and drugs have not yet found an economic way to penetrate to the fastnesses in which they precariously linger.
It is salutary that throughout the nation thoughtful men are pondering the possibilities and the necessity of improving the lot of millions of povertystricken and landless farm people. It will not be enough for the government merely to buy land for them and regard the problem as solved. Not only must they have land, but they must have unremitting supervision for many years. They must be taught sound methods of farming small tracts. They must be physically and morally rehabilitated. They must be cured of malaria and sexual diseases. They must learn thrift and industry. They must, in short, be recast and re-created. This is a problem for the years.
But, until the intelligence of America provides a better system, Negroes will continue to follow mules down the endless turnrows of the Delta; they will hoe the grass and pick the cotton, live on gingersnaps and pump water when times are bad and squander their money when times are good. As spring comes around, it will find them cropping again, catching their mules at dawn, bringing them to the lot at dusk, making love, drinking whiskey, shooting dice, fishing in the creeks, and praising, with matchless imagery and beauty, sweet Jesus, around whose throne they will one day be seated in peace and contentment and joy forever and forever.