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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer - 6. The Negro Landowner
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238 An American Dilemma
colored farm owners had declined by not less than one-third since 1910.
And Florida depends relatively less on tenants and relatively more on
wage labor than do other states in the South,®® so that even there but a
minority of the Negro farm population resided on their own places.
There are some general factors to be accounted for in this context. On
the one hand, the low land values in the South and the low investment in
land improvements, houses, and machines should make landownership
easier to attain. On the other hand, the inadequate organization of banking
and credit,®^ referred to above, works against both the acquiring and the
holding of land. Another general factor making landownership, when it
is attained, more precarious than it needs to be, is the old-fashioned system
of local real estate taxation, which the South shares with the rest of the
nation. This means that a landowner does not get a corresponding decrease
in his taxation in a year when his crop has failed or his income drops
because of a price fall. The dependence on hazardous cotton growing, of
course, makes this institutional deficiency more detrimental to the Southern
landowners.®®
More specifically, in interpreting the reversal in the trend of Negro own-
ership, Southeastern agriculture after 1910, and particularly during the
first years of the ’twenties, was hit by the boll weevil and by the general
upheaval caused by the War and the post-war depression. The owner
group, of course, should have been less affected than the tenant group, as
far as living standards are concerned, but the latter had no ownership to
lose. The fact that even the number of white owners in the South declined
by more than one-tenth between 1920 and 1930 (from almost 1,400,000
to 1,250,000) suggests that conditions in general were unfavorable for the
small farm owner. Between 1930 and 1940 (when the number of white
owners was I,384,CXX)), on the other hand, there was a corresponding large
increase in the number of white owners, whereas colored ownership con-
tinued to decline. This, however, scarcely means that the prospects for
economic success in small ownership had become any brighter. As will be
shown in the next chapter, it indicates rather that white owners, or those
who were able to get into that class, were the ones who had most oppor-
tunity to stay on the land, “if, in view of the paucity of migratory outlets,
they preferred to do that.”®®
Data on size of farm, acreage values, and farm values (Figure 5) give
a rather good idea of how marginal the existence of the small owner-
operators in the South tends to be. They show, further, that this is partic-
ularly true about Negro owners. It seems, finally, that their relative
position has become even more unfavorable than it was a couple of decades
ago. Land operated by croppers, particularly Negro croppers, has the
highest average value per acre. This, as we have said, is due to the fact
that plantations, by and large, are located on much of the best land of the
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