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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Footnotes - Chapter 10 - Chapter 11
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Footnotes •
1237
that the landlord will have him arrested on the charge of stealing a bridle or a few
potatoes (for it is easy to find something against almost any Negro), and he is brought
into court. In several cases I know of the escaping Negro has even been chased down with
bloodhounds. On appearing in court the Negro is naturally badly frightened. The wlilte
man is there and offers as a special favour to take him back and let him work out the fine
—^which sometimes requires six months—often a whole year. In this way Negroes are
kept in debt—so called debt-slavery or peonage—^year after year, they and their whole
family. One of the things that I couldn’t at first understand in some of the courts 1
visited was tlie presence of so many white men to stand sponsor for Negroes who had
committed various offences. Often this grows out of the feudal protective instinct which
the landlord feels for the tenant or servant of whom he is fond; but often it is merely
the desire of the white man to get another Negro worker.”*^
For a discussion of these practices today, see Raper, of, cit^^ pp. 187-188, and Chapter
26, Section 2. For a recent report of a case of peonage see the New York Sun (Novem-
ber 5, 1942), p. 9.
Chapter 1 1 . The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer
^ Hinton R. Helper, The Imfending Crisis (1857), pp. 57-58.
^Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Preliminary Release:
Series P-5a, Nos. 14-16; and Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940^ Agriculture^
United States Summary, First Series, Table VI.
^ T. J. Woofter, Jr., “The Negro and Agricultural Policy,” unpublished manuscript
prepared for this study (1940), p. 30.
^ T. J. Woofter, Jr., and Associates, Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation
(1936), p. II.
® Herman Clarence Nixon, Forty Acres and Steel Mules (1938), p. 13.
® Carter Goodrich and Others, Migration and Economic Offortunity (1936), pp.
125-126. A similar reconnaissance survey for 1934 indicated that conditions were even
worse in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, and
Kentucky where more than half of the land was believed to be eroded, at least “moder-
ately.”*’ In a third source, 53 per cent of the land in the East South Central Division
(Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi) is reckoned as “moderately eroded,”
23 per cent is “severely eroded,” and 7 per cent is “essentially destroyed for tillage.”*^
This has contributed to make the Southeast contain the largest contiguous area in the
country characterized by a low per capita value of farm land.^ For the whole South,
in 1940, the average value of land and buildings amounted to $596 per capita of
the rural farm population. The corresponding national figure was $1,1 1 6.®
* Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (1908), p. 98.
“Letter with manuscript table, July 12, 1939, from Dr. E. A. Norton, Head, Physical
Surveys Division, Soil Conservation Service, Department of Agriculture, to Dr. T. C.
McCormick.
* Department of Agriculture, Yearbook of Agriculture (1938), p. 90.
®Scc map published by the National Resources Committee in Problems of a Chang-
ing Pofulation (1938), p. 57.
* Sixteenth Census of the United States’, 1940^ Agriculture, United States Summary^ First
Scries, Table VI,
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