The Rural Poor in the American South: Case Studies of Exits from 20th Century Poverty

This work does not ask why poverty persisted in Indianola and other places in the rural south, but how—despite all the obstacles of state, society and market—the impoverished emerged from and exited poverty with civic assets as well as religious ones. The interdependency and citizenship pathways between families and the state and the pathways of aspiring agrarian capitalists led to a chronic and latent dysfunction—an inadequate protection of the welfare of all persons, especially the rural poor and black persons. This dysfunction was sustained, for much of the century gone‐by, by political reciprocity among United States presidents, southern white congressmen, federal district court judges, local southern elites and vigilantes, and their northern congressional counterparts. Dysfunctional state action fostered a racially‐based and insidious poverty and illiteracy—a system of servitude. Servitude is thus central to our understanding of how to unpack exits and understand pathways to full economic and political citizenship. I examined the lives of eight of the oldest families I could find in Sunflower County in the last decade of the twentieth century. Other than being elderly, I looked for families with some landowning status. These families ranged from fifty year sharecroppers who as women, girls, men and boys were subjected to violence and the insults that come with second‐class citizenship. The families in this study were sharecroppers, mule renters, black farmers, stay‐home mothers, welfare‐recipients, college graduates, primary and high school “incompleters,” community activists and the powerful. How did they exit poverty? It was not the social policy prescriptions or social provisions of the early and mid‐twentieth century that empowered the black rural poor, it was their collective refusal to see themselves as victims, their opportunities to own land, rear children, and their fierce will to sacrifice and function well as kinship families and religious communities that propelled exits from rural poverty in Mississippi and the Deep South.