American Congo: the African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta.

American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. By Nan Elizabeth Woodruff. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. [vi], 282. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-01047-7.)

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff has produced a masterful account of life in the Mississippi Delta in the era of Jim Crow. The book focuses on the struggle of African Americans to transcend the enormous obstacles confronting them in the Delta regions of the states of Mississippi and Arkansas. Woodruff places this struggle in the context of world capitalism and the problems it faced as imperial powers dealt with unprecedented challenges from their colonial subjects. While Woodruff suggests a connection between black Americans in the Delta and the colonized elsewhere, her actual focus is on events transpiring within the Mississippi Delta as African Americans engaged in their own war against homegrown tyrants. She makes a compelling argument that they faced a brutal and exploitative system controlled by planters who were buttressed by both local and state officials. Although planter power was threatened by national policies designed to further the country's interests during World Wars I and II, Woodruff demonstrates that planters ultimately influenced federal policy-makers and undermined the black struggle for fair treatment.

The book is divided into six chapters that set out and elaborate on her argument. Chapter 1 outlines the development of an alluvial empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an empire founded on lumber and railroads but matured on cotton and an international demand for the fleecy staple. Chapter 2 demonstrates, sometimes with horrifying detail, the tensions that existed between those who came to control the land and political machinery, the planters, and those who worked the land, the black sharecroppers. Chapter 3 focuses on the period immediately following World War I when black and white veterans returned to the Delta with differing agendas. White veterans expected a return to the status quo. Black veterans believed they had earned the rights of citizenship and, at the very least, fair treatment. They were to find something very different awaiting them, and Woodruff's account of the Elaine, Arkansas, race riot very dramatically illustrates the culmination of these different expectations. Chapter 4 develops further the black struggle to transcend conditions in the Delta and focuses on the response of planters in the 1920s to black migration northward, a migration that began during World War I and continued in the postwar years. Although some planters attempted to entice workers by improving material conditions on plantations, others continued to use violence, intimidation, and the instruments of peonage to keep labor in place. Chapter 5 examines New Deal policies and the creation of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in Poinsett County, Arkansas. The union was dedicated to the efforts of sharecroppers, black and white, to secure their share of Agricultural Adjustment Administration programs. Woodruff convincingly argues that the greatest achievement of the STFU was in publicizing conditions on Delta plantations. Chapter 6 closes the book with an examination of policies during World War II, when black activists finally began to make progress in the effort to secure some basic rights for African Americans. The demands of the war gave black sharecroppers opportunities to better their condition, opportunities they did not fail to seize.

Woodruff has produced a fine study of the situation in the Mississippi Delta in the age of Jim Crow. Based on exhaustive research and cogently argued, American Congo stands as an important addition to the literature on the twentieth-century South.

University of Arkansas 

JEANNIE M. WHAYNE