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1242 An American Dilemma
Arthur Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” unpublished manuscript prepared for
this study (1940), p. 1 8 1.
Woofter and Associates, Landlord and Tenant
y
p. II.
Ibid.y p. 29.
Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” p. 1 80.
Rupert B. Vance observes:
“For the tenant to seek to keep his own accounts within the credit system is often
regarded as a personal insult to the landlord or credit merchant.”*
Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, for instance, have this to say on the problem:
“One large planter in Rural County attributed the existence of a large number of
landlords who stole from their tenants to the difficulty of raising cotton profitably other-
wise, under the present economy.
“ ‘The only way a man can make money from farming is by stealing it from the
Negroes, or by living close. Some people get ahead by living close and saving every cent,
and then there are lots that steal from the Negroes. Some of them will take everything
a Negro has, down to his last chicken and hog.’
“A businessman, in one of the counties, whose business furnished him with a close
knowledge of the credit dealings of most landlords and tenants in the county, stated
that ‘practically all landlords’ cheated their tenants ‘in one way or another.’
Raper, “Race and Class Pressures,” p. 183.
Charles S. Johnson, Growing uf in the Black Belt (1941), p. 309. Italics ours.
Woofter and Associates, Landlord and Tenant^ p. 59,
Langsford and Thibodeaux, of, cit,y p. 48.
Woofter and Associates, Landlord and Tenanty p. 63.
Holley, Winston, and Woofter, of, cit,y pp. 27-28.
Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, of, cit,y p. 350.
Woofter and Associates, Landlord and Tenant
y
p. 60.
Information from officials of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, at conference
in Memphis, January 31, 1939.
There is probably not so much debt-peonage left, however, as is suggested by the
following statement, taken from the resolution of the Georgia Baptist Convention’s
Social Service Commission meeting in Augusta, November, 1939:
“Peonage or debt slavery has by no means disappeared from our land. There are more
white people affected by this diabolical practice than there were slave owners. There are
more Negroes held by these debt slavers than were actually owned as slaves. . . • The
method is the only thing which has changed.”*
Davis, Gardner, and Gardner quoted the following statement made by a Negro land-
lord in the middle of the ’thirties:
‘“You don’t get any more by being a good tenant! Grosvenor still takes it all and
charges them besides! . . . They all do it. I do it myself—some of these things. . . .
How can the tenant get his share? Most of them can’t read or write. They can’t sell
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