ABSTRACT
A central chapter in the history of black America involves the evolution of black agriculture and land tenure in the Blackbelt South. After the Civil War, four million black people, about half of whom lived on the cotton-producing plantations of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, owned almost nothing except their own clothes, some agricultural tools, farm animals, and their own labor power. Their immediate prospects for economic survival during this period of heightened racial tensions, black code legislation, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism seemed bleak. By 1910, a generation after Appomattox, blacks had seemingly succeeded in achieving a minor economic miracle in the Deep South. The number of black owned-operated farms that year was 212,972, almost double that of only twenty years before. A small, yet growing black petty bourgeoisie controlled important trades inside major cities. With the financial support of black-owned banks, black farmers were purchasing land on credit, speculating on the cotton market, and successfully competing with most small white farmers and tenants. After World War I, the number of black owner-operators of farms gradually declined; a black exodus grew to major proportions as black families abandoned agriculture. The story of tremendous black land acquisitions prior to 1910 and the immediate causes for Blackbelt land losses after World War I are largely obscured from the pages of black history.1
