A Vanishing Breed: Black Farm Owners in the South,1651-1982

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Loren L. Schweninger, Emeritus Professor (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: "I'm getting too old to battle it," sixty-nine-year old farmer Matthew Grant lamented in an 1987 interview. He had purchased his first sixty acres in 1947 for $3500 and eventually expanded his holdings to 190 acres, but increasing costs, low returns, and old age made him question whether or not he should keep up the struggle to retain his farm enterprise. Indeed, he was among the last black farm owners in a large section of North Carolina. "We don't have any black farmers left in Tillery," his son said, noddin g toward his father, "This is it." Only a generation before nearly 100 Negro families had been involved in the Tillery Farm Project of Halifax County as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal "forty acres and a mule" program to establish America's poor on land of their own.

Additional Information

Publication
Agricultural History 63 (Summer 1989):41-60
Language: English
Date: 1989
Keywords
Farming, African Americans, New Deal

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