Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South
Title Details
Pages: 176
Illustrations: 37 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 03/01/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6342-4
List Price: $24.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 03/01/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6355-4
List Price: $24.95
EPUB
Pub Date: 03/01/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6343-1
List Price: $24.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 03/01/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6341-7
List Price: $114.95
Related Subjects
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography
HISTORY / Historical Geography
Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South
How Black employees of the USDA redirected some of its funds to support poor Black farmers
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Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South documents how Black employees of the cooperative extension service of the USDA practiced rural improvement in ways that sustained southern Black farmers’ lives and livelihoods in the early decades of the twentieth century, resisting the white supremacy that characterized the Jim Crow South.
Mona Domosh details the various mechanisms—the transformation of home demonstration projects, the development of a movable school, and the establishment of Black landowning communities—through which these employees were able to alter USDA’s mandates and redirect its funds. These tweakings and translations of USDA directives enabled these employees to support poor Black farmers by promoting food production, health care, and land and home ownership, thus disturbing a system of plantation agriculture that relied on the devaluing of Black lives.
Through the documentation of these efforts, Domosh uncovers an important and previously unknown episode in the long history of international development that highlights the roots of liberal development schemes in the anti-Black racism that constituted plantation agriculture and illustrates how racist systems can be quietly and subtly resisted by everyday people working within the confines of white supremacy.
—Joshua Inwood, director, Penn State Lab for Analysis of Culture and Environment (PLACE)
—Anne Bonds, associate professor of geography, University of Wisconsin
—Beverley Mullings, geography professor, University of Toronto
—Greta De Jong, Journal of Southern History
—Jed DeBruin, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society