African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950.

African American Life in the Rural South, 1900-1950. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2003. Pp. viii, 227. $32.50, ISBN 0-8262-1471-1.)

According to the editor, R. Douglas Hurt, "[t]he purpose of this collection of essays ... is to provide a window to the rural African American past during the first half of the twentieth century to enable better historical understanding beyond the discussion of sharecropping, cotton, and poverty." Containing eight articles designed to fill a chasm in southern studies, this work begins with Louis M. Kyriakoudes's article about rural migration and urbanization in the South. The author "challenges the consensus opinion that landowners held their sharecroppers in continuing contracts that essentially made them peons" by asserting that "planters usually wrote off debts, because they had no hope of collection." He also reminds us that "World War II stimulated southern urbanization, which pulled many African American farmers from the land ..." (p. 5).

Ted Ownby assesses African American labors, folklife, and anti-agrarianism through the works of four significant African American autobiographers. He suggests, in the words of Hurt, that "[t]hese and other autobiographers ultimately believed that farm life impoverished the mind, broke the spirit, and ensured abject poverty...." Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless tackle the topic of the rural church via oral interviews: "The black churches have been instrumental in offering hope to a downtrodden people and have provided a place for self-expression and personal achievement," salvation, and social experiences while the buildings themselves have become "symbols of stability and community" (p. 6).

Race relations are the subject of Melissa Walker's essay in which she examines the "fluidity of race relations in the rural South" to discover that "the separation of the races relied on mutually understood boundaries for acceptable behavior" and that "Jim Crow ... was a policy of segregation built on nuance as well as force." Valerie Grim scrutinizes rural culture and "argues that all social events and technological acquisitions must be given meaning within the context of African American rural culture" (p. 7).

The last three entries deal with different aspects of dependency on agriculture and the consequences of that dependency. William P. Browne investigates the results of public policies that were fundamentally based on racism. Browne found that the United States Department of Agriculture "intentionally ignored black farmers because it considered them nonentities in production agriculture." After receiving no justice at any level "African American farmers had little choice but to migrate to the cities ..." (p. 7). "Jeannie Whayne discusses the efforts of black county and home demonstration agents" who "challenged customary relationships between black sharecroppers and white planters." Whayne also contends "that these black agents became skilled negotiators while dealing with white policy makers and supervisors." Nonetheless, World War II made black extension agents "as superfluous as African American farmers." Last but not least, Peter Coclanis and Bryant Simon attempt to show that amid strategies of protest and resistance to Jim Crow, rural blacks "g[a]ve expression to their condition, and challenged ... whites in subtle but consistent ways. To the extent that African Americans showed loyalty to whites, they did so as a subterfuge to gain what they wanted ..." (p. 8).

So, what is the bottom line? Hurt surmises that in the final analysis rural black folk were "not always or entirely helpless victims" but instead persons who "took responsibility for negotiating the complex world of the rural South during the early twentieth century" (pp. 8, 9). Black people, said Hurt, "took initiative, that is, agency, for their lives in a variety of subtle ways to create order, gain dignity, and win freedom--all to achieve a better life in the rural South." Hurt holds that "this collection of essays is designed to encourage further study and discussion of an important but little-known aspect of the American past" even though his contributors do much to add to the abundant field of southern history (p. 9).

LEE E. WILLIAMS III

University of Alabama at Huntsville