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Title details for Dispossession by Pete Daniel - Available

Dispossession

Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights

by Pete Daniel
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Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594—a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure.
More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 29, 2013

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9781469602028

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781469608143
      • File size: 3526 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781469608143
      • File size: 3526 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from March 15, 2013

      In nine richly detailed and tightly argued chapters, Daniel (The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969), award-winning historian of the U.S. South, exposes the systemic racism that dispossessed 93 of every 100 U.S. black farmers of their land and their livelihood between 1940 and 1974, reducing their numbers from 681,790 to 45,594. While the 1940s Double-V crusade for democracy abroad and at home extended into the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, black farmers were nearly wiped out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in cahoots with agribusiness, Daniel shows. Intentionally twisting federal policy on farm aid, the USDA cut blacks off from credit, information, and public services. Black farmers' $1 billion-plus class-action lawsuit in Pigford v. Glickman (1999) proved decades-long discrimination, as Daniel documents. VERDICT Soberingly revealing the dark underside of an era hailed for black success against racism, Daniel's work exposes sickening, irreparable, racist destruction that compels reconception of popular memories of a generation of civil rights victories. This book belongs in any serious collection on U.S. civil rights, federal farm policy, or 20th-century America.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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