Ferguson, Robert Hunt (Author)
This is the first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm (1936–42) and its descendant, Providence Farm (1938–56). The two intentional communities drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor. In the winter of 1936, two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families settled on some two thousand acres in the rural Mississippi Delta, one of the most insular and oppressive regions in the nation. Thus began a twenty-year experiment―across two communities―in interracialism, Christian socialism, cooperative farming, and civil and economic activism.Robert Hunt Ferguson recalls the genesis of Delta and Providence: how they were modeled after cooperative farms in Japan and Soviet Russia and how they rose in reaction to the exploitation of small- scale, dispossessed farmers. Although the staff, volunteers, and residents were very much everyday people―a mix of Christian socialists, political leftists, union organizers, and sharecroppers―the farms had the backing of such leading figures as philanthropist Sherwood Eddy, who purchased the land, and educator Charles Spurgeon Johnson and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as trustees. On these farms, residents developed a cooperative economy, operated a desegregated health clinic, held interracial church services and labor union meetings, and managed a credit union. Ferguson tells how a variety of factors related to World War II forced the closing of Delta, while Providence finally succumbed to economic boycotts and outside threats from white racists.Remaking the Rural South shows how a small group of committed people challenged hegemonic social and economic structures by going about their daily routines. Far from living in a closed society, activists at Delta and Providence engaged in a local movement with national and international roots and consequences.
...MoreReview Mark Newman (2019) Review of "Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi". Agricultural History (pp. 558-560).
Book
Nancy K. Berlage;
(2016)
Farmers Helping Farmers: The Rise of the Farm and Home Bureaus, 1914-1935
(/isis/citation/CBB290230957/)
Chapter
Reuss, Martin;
(2010)
Exploitation and innovation along the lower Mississippi, 1750--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001180781/)
Thesis
Whitney E. Barringer;
(2016)
The Corruption of Promise: The Insane Asylum in Mississippi, 1848-1910
(/isis/citation/CBB642844715/)
Book
J.Parker Lamb;
(2012)
Railroads of Meridian
(/isis/citation/CBB147508280/)
Article
Yulonda Eadie Sano;
(2019)
“Protect the Mother and Baby”: Mississippi Lay Midwives and Public Health
(/isis/citation/CBB301228659/)
Article
Reuss, Martin;
(1982)
The Army Corps of Engineers and flood control politics on the lower Mississippi
(/isis/citation/CBB001180769/)
Book
Mason A. Carter;
Robert C. Kellison;
R. Scott Wallinger;
(2015)
Forestry in the U.S. South: A History
(/isis/citation/CBB270796317/)
Book
Jenny M. Luke;
(2018)
Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South
(/isis/citation/CBB243389922/)
Book
Louis A. Ferleger;
John D. Metz;
(2014)
Cultivating Success in the South: Farm Households in the Postbellum Era
(/isis/citation/CBB064809821/)
Article
Phillips, Sarah T.;
Potts, Dale;
Petty, Adrienne;
Schultz, Mark;
Stalcup, Sam;
Effland, Anne;
(2013)
Reflections on One Hundred and Fifty Years of the United States Department of Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB001320820/)
Article
Morris, Christopher;
(2009)
A More Southern Environmental History
(/isis/citation/CBB001030727/)
Book
Katherine Rye Jewell;
(2017)
Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB499980570/)
Book
Casey P. Cater;
(2019)
Regenerating Dixie: electric energy and the modern South
(/isis/citation/CBB592644863/)
Article
Tuttle, Kelly;
(2012)
For the Love of the Lab
(/isis/citation/CBB001450607/)
Article
Mock, Michelle;
(2014)
The Electric Home and Farm Authority, “Model T Appliances,“ and the Modernization of the Home Kitchen in the South
(/isis/citation/CBB001450309/)
Book
H.Roger Grant;
(2006)
Rails through the Wiregrass: A History of the Georgia & Florida Railroad
(/isis/citation/CBB391471917/)
Article
Valerie Grim;
(1994)
The Impact of Mechanized Farming on Black Farm Families in the Rural South: A Study of Farm Life in the Brooks Farm Community, 1940-1970
(/isis/citation/CBB017199014/)
Article
Way, Albert G.;
(2015)
The Invisible and Indeterminable Value of Ecology: From Malaria Control to Ecological Research in the American South
(/isis/citation/CBB001551434/)
Book
Thomas, Karen Kruse;
(2011)
Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935--1954
(/isis/citation/CBB001251130/)
Book
Monique Laney;
(2015)
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era
(/isis/citation/CBB009589111/)
Be the first to comment!