ABSTRACT

The main facts of rural Southern poverty and the distress of the rural Negro people in the South have been well-known for a long time. The plantation-tenant system is one of America's "public scandals". Even before the Civil War there were many Southern patriots who saw some of the detrimental factors working to undermine the welfare of the region. Negro farmers have always been dependent on the cotton economy to a much greater extent than have been the white farmers in the South. The story of the Negro in agriculture would have been a rather different one if the Negro farmer had had greater opportunity to establish himself as an independent owner. In the vicious system of economic poverty and exploitation of land and human resources, where every adverse factor is a partial cause of all the others, the boll weevil caused catastrophe.