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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer - 7. Historical Reasons for the Relative Lack of Negro Farm Owners
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Chapter ii. Southern Plantation Economy 241
there is scarcely any doubt about their being highly significant. In addition,
however, a number of specific factors have been operative. Some of them
have already been touched upon in the preceding chapters. There is, in the
first place, the fact that rural Negroes, to a great extent, are concentrated
on plantation areas, where comparatively few small holdings are for sale.
There was no general land reform, and the Negro did not participate in
the development of the West. But even in Kansas, where one of the few
noteworthy attempts to organize new fost-bellufit Negro settlements was
made, there were not more than a few hundred Negro owner-operators in
194OJ and some of these owners probably were the descendants of persons
who had been brought to Kansas as slaves. Undoubtedly the attitudes of
the white settlers constituted the main cause for this lack of success. In the
largely over-populated, white-dominated districts of the South, these
attitudes, if anything, were still more pronounced.
There have, however, always been some small holdings for sale in the
areas of Negro concentration, and more have been added to this supply as
plantations tended to disintegrate.^® During the years immediately follow-
ing the Civil War, land values were low, and that was one of the reasons
why a few Negroes, along with many poor whites, managed to get into
the landowning class. Some ex-slaves bought land from their former mas-
ters, and there are places where such Negro properties still constitute a
large proportion of all Negro-owned farms.^^
The Negro has, however, usually been at a disadvantage when competing
with white buyers even in the Black Belt. Apart from economic and other
factors already mentioned, he has had to overcome segregational and
discriminatory attitudes of the rural white population.
. . . Negro landownership—even now—can be achieved only by means of a most
exacting and highly selective procedure j the would-be owner must be acceptable to the
white community, have a white sponsor, be content with the purchase of acreage
least desired by the whites, and pay for it in a very few years.
The Negro buys land only when some white man will sell to him. Just because a
white man has land for sale docs not mean that a Negro, even the one most liked
and respected by him, can buy it even if he has the money. Whether a particular
Negro can buy a particular tract of land depends upon its location, its economic and
emotional value to the white owner and other white people, the Negro’s cash and
credit resources, and, doubtless most important of all, his personal qualities in the light
of the local attitudes: He must be acceptable.®®
Negro ownership emerges in areas where land Is rented, rather than where it is
worked by croppers or wage hands. Renters do not cultivate the “proud acres” of the
plantations. They are common only where the tracts of land are too small, too
unproductive, or too distant to warrant supervision; or where the owners, because of
other remunerative business, make little elfort to secure maximum revenue from their
lands. On the out-of-the-way, or neglected tracts, in the nooks and corners between
creeks and between white communities, and in areas where white community organ!-
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