UNC Press - Dispossession

352 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 halftones, notes, index

Cloth

ISBN 978-1-4696-0201-1

Published: March 2013

Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure.

More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.

About the Author

Pete Daniel has been both a professor of history and a public historian. He has served as president of the Southern Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, and he currently lives in Washington, D.C. This is his seventh book.

Reviews

"Soberingly revealing the dark underside of an era hailed for black success against racism, Daniel's work exposes sickening, irreparable, racist destruction that compels reconception of popular memories of a generation of civil rights victories. This book belongs in any serious collection on U.S. civil rights, federal farm policy, or 20th-century America."
--Library Journal

"A rich, compelling, and important book. No one chronicles the way government and the advocates of scientific agriculture have changed the rural culture of the South better than Pete Daniel."
--Anthony J. Badger, Cambridge University

"In this intense and insightful book, Pete Daniel exposes the institutional racism at work in all agencies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while chronicling the struggles of the black farmers 'who stubbornly refused to go quietly from their farms.' Expanding the boundaries of the civil rights movement, Dispossession is a powerful and important contribution to the historiography of the black freedom struggle."
--John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

"Daniel's book documents the countless discriminatory practices of the USDA, which unrelentingly undermined Afro-American farmers' ability to succeed. He tells of the personal agony experienced by both Afro-American farmers and Afro-American employees of the USDA. The book exposes how USDA bureaucrats stripped Afro-Americans not only of their rights, but also, arguably, of their citizenship."
--Timothy C. Pigford, lead plaintiff, Pigford v. Glickman