A Colony Within A Nation

The Twentieth Century South as a “Colonial” State

 By: Alexa Sparks, University of Alabama

“If it is true that the South is ‘the Nation's No. 1 economic problem,’ the fundamental historical explanation of that condition is to be found in the fact that for more than three centuries this region, in greater or less degree, has occupied the status of a colony.”[1]

Responding to President Roosevelt’s declaration that the South had become the nation’s primary economic problem, then president of the Southern Historical Association, B.B. Kendrick offered a radical counterpoint: if the South was a unique economic problem, it was not the fault of the South, but rather of an “imperialistic system” which had held the South in functional bondage since the foundation of the nation itself.* Radical as it might have been, Kendrick’s argument was hardly without precedent. Advocates of the New South, almost a half century prior, had argued that the Old South had functionally been a colony of the North, that it had “rested everything on slavery and agriculture” and fostered a system of reliance upon the North.[2] If one goes even further, one can find both public figures and private interests throughout the South which railed against the South’s economic subjugation to the North, especially in light of rising sectional tensions. However, Kendrick is unique in how clearly and bluntly he employs the language of colonialism. Though, like those who came before him, Kendrick’s examination ultimately falls short. It sees the colonial status of the South purely as being perpetuated by those who he identifies as its colonial masters: northern commercial interests and international capital, without understanding the complicity of Southern capital and the Southern elite. It fails to differentiate between the economic subjugation of the region from the material and lived subjugation of many of its worst-off inhabitants. Despite these failings, however, it contains a streak of truth. In quite important ways, the South was a colonial society. When one accepts this framing, one is granted a unique understanding of the context of both the Southern establishment and its opposition throughout the 20th century and into today; an understanding which allows one to not only better understand the South but also to view the South within a broader narrative of colonization and decolonization.[3] 

As Kendrick himself realized, such a bold interpretation demands a strong foundation, in this case a strong understanding of what precisely one means when one discusses a “colony.” For Kendrick, this concept was  purely economic  defining a region which “produce[s] raw materials which they exchange on unfavorable terms with citizens of the imperial power.”[4] Many scholars have continued in a similar, economically-oriented, direction. Scholars within the neo-Marxist tradition continue to define colonies and colonialism in economic terms, though more inspired by Marx than the raw arithmetic of Kendrick. For those within this tradition, colonialism is an aspect of global capitalism, a system of exploitation constructed to exploit producers and separate them from control of production/capital.[5] However, both understandings elude from what much of more recent scholarship has emphasized: colonialism as “a form of domination.”[6]  In this sense, a colony is not defined because of its economic relation to another region nor through its economic form of production, but rather more socially, in the subjugation of one group by another.

Within the context of this paper, it will be useful to acknowledge that this subjugation was quite often racialized, especially within the American South. As Frantz Fanon forcefully argued in Black Skin, White Masks, the driving force of colonial ideology was “the confrontation of ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ men,” a confrontation which has almost universally been racially defined.[7] For students of the American South, this will hardly be unfamiliar. “As early as 1944, W.E.B. Du Bois described African Americans as having a ‘semi-colonial status,’” offering a recognition of the colonial status of the South from a far different perspective than Kendrick’s. Du Bois’s insight was carried forward in the book Black Power which argued that the institutional racism of Southern and American society placed African Americans as “colonial subjects.”[8] Much like Kendrick’s argument however, the arguments of Du Bois and of Carmichael and Hamilton are a continuation of a much older tradition. Indeed, the title of this work itself alludes to an 1853 work which recognized that African Americans formed a “nation within a nation,” deprived of their political rights and subjugated by the society which they found themselves within.[9] Through incorporating such voices, one reminds oneself that colonialism also had a lived aspect, as Fanon examined it in the psychology of those exploited and as later activists would explore through the material and social subjugation. Thus, though none of these definitions alone can encapsulate the entirety of what defines a colonial society, together they offer a strong framework: economic inequity within the larger imperial system, economic exploitation within the society itself, and the political/social subjugation of exploited social groups. In seeking to apply these definitions to the South of the twentieth century, Kendrick again would be correct to argue that in “this general pattern the South [had] almost perfectly conform[ed].”[10] To demonstrate this, let one turn to the South at the turn of the century and examine these factors in some detail. 

Examining the South of 1900, though a great deal of economic progress had been made since the collapse of the Southern economy following the Civil War, “the South failed to improve its economic position relative to that of the Northeast and Midwest [the regions which for the purpose of this analysis serve as the imperial metropole]” and remained in an unequal position within the national economy.[11] Though one can argue whether the product or a force toward this inequality was correlated with an economic inequity between the two regions. As Woodward describes in Origins of the New South, the South was “limited largely to the role of a producer of raw materials, a tributary of industrial powers, an economy dominated by absentee owners.” Befittingly, it was this fact that led Woodward to compare the South to the “republics below the Rio Grande,” themselves the subjects of a growing American imperial presence.[12] Both this inequality and inequity can trace their roots to the nature of the Southern economy which remained oriented towards the production of raw materials, a holdover of the Old South. The Southern economy remained predominantly agricultural and oriented towards the production of key cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar cane, each of which required further manufacturing for consumption. Though the South developed some of the industries necessary for the refinement of raw materials, much of this industry remained in the North.

Cotton, the undisputed staple crop of the Southern economy, had to be processed and woven into usable fabric and from there into refined goods yet the South had little capacity to do so. Though the South had undergone a veritable “revolution” in textile manufacturing from the twenty years prior to the twentieth-century and despite the fact that the textile industry was one of the South’s largest industries in the period, the vast majority, almost 70 percent, of American textile mills remained in the North.[13] This trend continued within other sectors of the Southern economy as well. The timber industry which “constituted the largest southern industry in terms both of employment and of value added,” though the South drove national production of raw timber (unrefined wood), it lagged in the development of lumbering industries, though it did eventually develop its own native planning and sawmills.[14] When the South did develop its own manufactories, no matter the industry, it often still relied upon or was incorporated into a system of Northern capital. The South lacked much financial capital and often relied upon Northern investments, a fact that became especially visible when one of the South’s “largest and most promising firm[s]” was bought out by the larger Northern United States Steel Corporation in the midst of an economic recession.[15] The very infrastructure which might have allowed for further Southern development, such as railroads and later electrical plants, was also dominated by Northern capital. As Kendrick correctly summarized, like many colonies, the Southern economy was directed primarily toward the production of raw materials with its real estate, manufacturing, and transportation all dominated by outside investors. Though one might argue that this economic domination was itself a factor of Southern society of previous decades, it would be difficult to deny that the South held an inequitable position which forced its economy to rely upon and ultimately be dominated by outside interests. 

In each of these industries, the Southern economy relied upon one form of exploitation or another. In agriculture, in the wake of the collapse of the slave economy, a variety of factors pushed this exploitation unto the rising system of tenancy, in which landless Southern farmers contracted with landowners to work their land (and likely received some capital investment such as tools or seed) in exchange for payment to the landowner – often in goods produced, though sometimes cash. Those most exploited by this system were sharecroppers, who often remained in debt to their landowner, who furnished everything from their home to the plow they used, and as such became caught within a cycle of debt that often trapped generations within a system of debt-enforced labor, which some have compared to slavery.[16] In 1900, roughly half of Southern farmers were tenants, and many of those that were not worked increasingly less valuable land as the elite Southern landowners expanded their grasp on the most valuable and fertile Southern land.[17] As one of the more famous texts on the subject notes, the Southern farmer in the decades after the Civil War had been reduced to a system easily comparable to peasantry. In the timber industry, industrial and technological changes promulgated a similar shift. In an industry once dominated by a few “skilled axmen” who had often been called the “aristocrats of labor,” mechanization and the increasing capitalization of the industry led to the rise of a predominantly unskilled labor force of wage laborers.[18] Furthermore, here too did industrial management seek to ensure access to a pliable and reliable workforce. Working with state legislatures throughout the region, timber companies advanced a similar system of debt and contracts, which put many mill and lumber workers into a state of functional peonage.[19] No matter the industry, the Southern elite worked universally against efforts at worker empowerment, especially those aimed at unionization. If one limits oneself purely to the turn of the century, the South would have harbored varied labor groups of any kind, with a small number of Knights of Labor chapters as well as American Federation of Labor locals, predominantly in small, skilled industries, making up what few labor organizations did exist.[20] However, even extending the scope forward several decades, the South remained one of the least organized portions of the country. By the Thirties, one could comfortably speak of a Southern exception to a national pattern of unionization, which many academics and scholars alike did.[21] Throughout the Southern economy, there was a pattern of increasing economic disempowerment and indeed, as many boosters would have proudly proclaimed, a restrained working-class.  

This disempowerment was not limited to the economic sphere, as many poor Southerners, especially Black Southerners, found themselves restricted from the realms of political and social power. Of the region’s poor white population, in the decades prior, they struggled to organize any serious opposition to the rising system of debt and disempowerment, often only gaining brief political or social power through organizations such as the Grange or the Populists.[22] When such organizations did briefly gain prominence, it was almost always met with backlash of some form or another. In many states, poor whites were increasingly disenfranchised by various tools of voter suppression, most notably the poll tax, which though directed and framed as a tool of Black voter suppression, quite often reduced the rate of poor white electoral participation as well.[23]

Though extending to poor whites, this system of disempowerment was aimed predominantly at Black Southerners. In an era functionally synonymous with the height of Jim Crow segregation, it is not difficult to find examples of the political and social disenfranchisement of Black Southerners. Black Southerners in every Southern state were disenfranchised through a variety of means, including the poll tax, but also literacy requirements, white primaries, and other legal provisions restricting Black voting power.[24] Black Southerners also faced a rising series of social restrictions from the creation of a separate, unequal educational system to rising segregation in public spaces of any sort.[25] Across racial lines, one could extend a broader argument of class disempowerment to one’s analysis of the various institutions of Southern society from churches to the media. Though such an analysis holds weight, one cannot underemphasize the importance of racialized oppression in the  Southern system. That said, whether examining class or racial disempowerment, it is clear that not only were the majority of Southerners disempowered, the entirety of the Southern economy and the power of the Southern elite relied upon such disempowerment. 

In each of these factors, a clear and well-established system of colonial power can be seen. Given such clear-cut examples, it would be difficult to disagree with Kendrick that the region existed as a new “perfect” example of a colonial society. However, as complete as the construction of the colonial South may have been, in the decades that followed the beginning of the new century, this system would face serious challenges. 

Though the immediate decades following the turn of the century would test the structure of Southern society in their own ways, no decade would so thoroughly shake the South as the Thirties.[26] In the immediate wake of the market crash, what little existed of Southern industry “lost whatever momentum it had gained.”[27] Southern farmers fared even worse. Crop prices plummeted and as farms reduced the size of their workforce, the countryside began to be occupied by itinerant bands of destitute former sharecroppers and tenant farmers.[28] A welfare system built more upon charity, or at best as a system of social control, strained to provide even the most basic support to the poor, a fact which threatened not only labor instability in many industries but also social instability.[29] In terms of colonial analysis, through the Great Depression, the Southern periphery lost access to Northern capital, lost national and international demand, which drove its exploitative economy, and faced strains which challenged the very fabric of Southern society. 

Ironically, perhaps a greater perceived threat could at times come from the man whose victory many Southerners had claimed would “snatch victory from the Yankee's hand”: President Franklin Roosevelt.[30] To be clear, though Roosevelt himself would often rile the Southern colonial elite, such as in the 1938 midterm elections in which he attempted to primary out several of his more conservative Southern opponents, he was far more often conciliatory with the Southern wing of the party, which he required for both continued electoral and legislative success.[31] Far more worrying for Southerners was the “cadre” of political liberals and social democrats which Roosevelt brought into his administration, many of whom took a far more pointed tact on the nature of Southern society. The system through which Southern elite maintained a firm grasp on labor was challenged by a newly empowered National Labor Relations Board. Key executive offices such as the Department of Agriculture (USDA), especially relevant within the Southern economy, became filled with a new class of intellectual administrators who pushed for a version of the New Deal which expanded beyond mere price controls and wage increases and pressed onward to establish a system of “massive citizen involvement,” an attempt to build a planned society around a system of local democracy.[32] Figures such as Henry Wallace embraced the language of economic democracy and cooperative society, all of which served in deep contrast to the deeply hierarchical Southern society which they looked to reform. Perhaps all the more  damningly, many within this group also began to challenge the nature of racial hierarchy within the South, directly calling out the semi-colonial nature of the South. Though such actors often were edge figures within the administration, such statements almost always incurred Southern ire and anxiety. Facing a national government headed by a president who often bucked with Southern interests and empowered the voices of active dissent, many within the Southern political elite began to view the New Deal as much as a threat as they did a chance for recovery. 

Southern colonial society was not merely composed of its elite, however, and for those subjugated within the Southern colonial system, the Great Depression and the New Deal offered a chance to promulgate their own vision for the future and to challenge the prevailing political system. Some of these movements were themselves adjacent to the New Deal. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) was founded in part to advocate for extension of agricultural benefits to Southern tenant farmers and, at least early on in the Agricultural Adjustment Agency’s history, would have had some allies amongst the more liberal leadership of the agency.[33] The STFU represented one end of what one might term “anti-colonial” sentiment, as though the leadership of the STFU was often quite politically radical and despite the fact that the interracial structure of the union was a direct challenge to the system of segregation, its goals were far more limited.[34] The STFU served to challenge the Southern system of labor exploitation but primarily through the legal and political frameworks already being built by the New Deal on the national level. One could argue that more middle-class or intellectually oriented organizations such as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, served a similar niche, as well as sought similar means as can be seen in its cooperation with the New Deal.[35] A more direct challenge was levied in the form of the cooperative movement which embraced a system of economic and political empowerment on the local level and established cooperative farms throughout the South. As one history of the cooperative movement points out, such efforts such as those carried out at the Delta Cooperative Farm in Mississippi, served as a lived and material expression of an “alternate version of the rural South antithetical to the oppression endemic to the region.”[36]

An even more radical vision was offered by those engaged in both political and rarely literal  insurgency against the Southern power structure. Within this falls such groups as the Communist Party who early in the Depression had served as an organizing factor of the unemployed and disenchanted, a fact which led to regular confrontations with the police such as occurred in Birmingham in 1930. Perhaps more importantly, the Party offered one of the most radical alternatives to the existing colonial structure: the right of self-determination for the region’s Black population, a right which at times functioned even to advocate for the establishment of a new nation within the Southern Black Belt governed by and for its African-American majority.[37] What is striking about all of these movements within this framework is how neatly these same tactics would fit within narratives of decolonization. Framed within these terms, the South was home to a variety of anti-colonial movements from advocates of liberalization, those demanding land reform and land redistribution, and the most active voices of decolonization, even independence activists. For a Southern elite already challenged on the political stage, such a breadth of social challenges naturally only increased their anxiety and their tendency toward repression as the era appeared to threaten a (second) reconstruction of Southern society. 

Despite both the best efforts of Southern grassroots insurgents and the worst fears of the Southern elite, neither the Depression nor the New Deal would bring about the decolonization of Southern society. As alluded to in the very beginning of this section, the dominance of Southern elite within the Democratic Party and within the region also allowed for them to direct New Deal policy towards their own interests and to blunt those policies which threatened the unique nature of the colonial South. Roosevelt was often forced to work with rather than against the large political machines which served the oligarchy of Southern cities and Southern landed elite just as quickly ensured that their furor against the USDA was translated into the empowerment of conservatives within the Department.[38] As one of the best works on the liberal reformers of “economic democracy” points out, their vision was always one that was intended or idealized, it would never and could never be the version carried out because of the power Southern politicians held within the national government and within their own home states.[39] Many of the native challenges to their rule either collapsed or were repressed. The STFU began to face its own internal power struggles between its more radical members and those more concerned with maintaining its existing coalition and power and would ultimately lose the position of public dominance it had once held earlier in the decade.[40]

The cooperative movement would find itself facing the same struggles as those that Delta Cooperative Farm ultimately faced: a divide between leadership (often white and non-Southern) and membership (often Black ex-sharecroppers) and repression and isolation from local communities who isolated the organizations both socially and economically, dooming them to collapse.[41] The Communist Party as well would face similar issues as well as outright criminalization and large-scale repression in many parts of the South. By 1940, the Southern elite could confidently claim that they had weathered the worst of the Depression and  tamed the excesses of the New Deal. With the coming of the Second World War, national policy began to shift towards unity and economic growth, both of which served Southern interests quite well.

Taking a larger scope, one might even note that the New Deal in many ways did not serve to dissemble the colonial state, it served to retrench it. Agriculture is a prime example of such. Though Southern politicians initially raised concerns about the inclusion of farm laborers within certain labor protections, they  fought to ensure that federal funds would be disbursed to landowners only Their victory in this not only protected the system as it existed but brought in drastically increased capital for Southern landowners who could then reinvest these funds to expand their own power. As one scholar put it: “Those who had access to federal government funds took advantage of their opportunities and consolidated their positions” and consolidate their positions they did, leaving the Thirties and Forties with larger farms, more access to capital, and a decreased reliance upon their own labor force due to increasing modernization efforts.[42] Far from overthrowing Southern gentry, New Deal agricultural policy ultimately allowed them to transition from the plantation-sharecropping economy and into the agribusiness model, a shift which suited them quite well financially.[43] Similarly, manufacturing interests only grew in the region, especially with the beginning of the Second World War, which again brought increased capital and stability to the Southern economy.[44] All the better for the Southern colonial elite, in colonial terms, all that this meant was that the region was shifting from funneling resources to the metropole and to international capital and keeping an increasing amount of resources within the hierarchical Southern system. Far from decolonization, the New Deal only reaffirmed the position of the Southern colonial elite and only shifted rather than challenged the structures which dominated within the South. 

This stabilization would not last long however, as just two decades later, beginning in the Sixties, the Southern colonial system would face yet another challenge, itself in many ways an echo of the New Deal: the Great Society.[45] Like the New Deal before it, the Great Society would challenge the foundations of the Southern system. The system through which Southern industries kept Southern workers impoverished and indebted was challenged by a broad commitment to various welfare programs, an economic empowerment which, when tied into the political and social empowerment offered in civil rights legislation, threatened to topple the system of class and racial subjugation which had defined the Southern colonial system.[46] One of the lesser discussed aspects of this economic empowerment was President Lyndon Johnson’s agricultural and rural development programs. Johnson, himself a former representative of a deeply rural Southern district, understood the importance of what he called the “countryside” to the Southern economy and to the system of Southern power. One of the largest programs of the Great Society, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was quickly tasked with dealing with the systemic rural poverty which defined much of the nation but especially the South. To do so, it was to offer capital to “rural families who needed money to help them permanently increase their earning capacity” as well as those who wished to “purchase land [and to] improve the operation of family farms.”[47] Unlike many New Deal programs, the Office of Economic Opportunity was also directed to provide funding to “improve housing, education, and child care services for migrant farm workers,” a recognition that though the South had begun to shift away from sharecroppers, Southern agricultural interests had developed new systems through which to keep necessary farm labor in stable and controlled supply.[48] Perhaps most critically, as the New Deal and Roosevelt administration had before it, though Johnson himself was not entirely fond of the language regarding “community action,” many of the executors of the Great Society as well as those who took up the drive on the state and local level strongly embraced the language of “community action” and community governance.[49] Just as it had before, this language raised alarms for entrenched Southern political interests who began to fight the program with every tool in their power. 

As had happened thirty years prior, many in Southern society took up the call heralded by the Great Society and took up the banner in their own effort to struggle against the colonial structures in which they found themselves. Even more so than the New Deal, with the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Great Society actively fostered such grassroots efforts and integrated them within its own development. Thus, when activists from the revived cooperative movement began to redevelop the movement around the issues facing the modern South, such as through establishing housing cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and cooperative agricultural programs, they did so with backing from the OEO.[50] For those cooperatives which had survived from previous decades, such as Koinonia Farm, the grants and aid provided by the OEO, offered hope, as well as, reintegration into a larger movement which allowed some such holdovers to regain prominence or at least some social/financial capital.[51] As with the cooperative movement before it, this revival recognized that it was not only struggling to secure economic prosperity or economic equity, as they connected the project directly to the “power and independence” of the poor, especially Black Southerners.[52] Such developments not only challenged the power of Southern agricultural and rural interests over labor but they also challenged the structure of the Southern rural economy as the larger of such programs were often aimed at either land reform/the protection of smallholder land ownership or the development of a more diverse economy within rural hubs, both of which challenged the hegemonic monopoly long held by Southern landowners.

Even beyond those programs which fell within the purview of “rural development,” the Great Society offered a broad banner to those looking to improve the lives of poor Southerners. One such example was a group called “Mississippians for Public Education.” Tied into several Great Society programs, the group struggled to bring the various new educational programs promised within the Great Society to rural Mississippi communities, pushing the development of Head Start and similar preschool programs.[53] Though indirectly, this offered a more long-term challenge to the system through which Southern labor was kept isolated and “docile,” as well as challenging a system which kept laborers “low-skilled” so as to suppress wages. This connection between education and economic freedom is all the clearer in the struggle to bring remedial education into the state in later years.[54] Within this same decade, one could also make the argument for the existence of an insurgent faction within the renewed struggle to “decolonize” the South, an argument which could draw upon the existence of Black power groups throughout the South as well as the more recent literature examining the universal nature of armed resistance in the Civil Rights Movement.[55] Certainly one can see an argument that if the Communist Party had served as the insurgency of the past struggle, then organizations such as the Lowndes County Freedom Party could surely be placed within that same tradition. Whilst this is certainly true, one might also wish to note that the Great Society itself often empowered more radical organizations within its own coalition. In many Southern cities, such as Houston, the Great Society was carried forward by a broad coalition within which one could find “Prophetic Christianity, confrontational civil rights activism, and the vision of participatory democracy and community organizing espoused by members of the New Left,” all of which offered a radical reinterpretation of the potential of  Southern society.[56] Though not always so ideologically diverse, the Great Society did offer a platform upon which the critics of the Southern colonial system could gain a firm foundation in both the public square and in their funding. As such, it raised yet again the specter of Southern decolonization. 

Despite the climatic nature of the final section, there is a temptation to stop here as in many ways, the question of what happened next still remains. Certainly, one can note that just as had happened to the New Deal, many of the boldest and most constructive programs of the Great Society would collapse within two decades. The revived cooperative movement would begin to collapse as the OEO and other such organizations withdrew in the face of public backlash and a federal loss of funding.[57] Though still existing as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the movement has been seriously hindered by this loss of support and one would struggle to deny that the movement had lost the heights it had achieved in the Sixties and Seventies. Many of the educational systems instituted by the Great Society, from those examined in Mississippi to the more famous ones such as bussing, would become the object of intense backlash and rage from white communities especially.[58] Though many of the key programs now recognizable to the program of the Great Society have remained until today, one cannot deny that the message of community government and local democracy carried by its earliest advocates has long since vanished. None of this is to deny the deep impact had by Great Society programs, but if viewed through the lens of Southern decolonization, it would appear they were imperfect at best. At worst, like the New Deal programs before them, they could be actively subverted to serve the ends of the Southern political elite. Despite the best attempts of activist groups within organizations such as the cooperative movement as well as organizations of Black landed farmers, the policies of the USDA were redirected to funnel money toward the largest farms and agribusinesses, a process which meant that by the end of the decade there had been an 88% decline in Black farm ownership – a rate far higher than their white counterparts.[59] In many ways, though the origin of Southern agribusiness and land consolidation may be found in the New Deal, it would be driven forward by the policies of the Great Society. Sadly, this system of discrimination would not end until many decades later after a substantial class action lawsuit and even then, there are certainly elements of the USDA program which raise questions today. Ironically, here too one might argue that far from decolonizing the South, the Great Society in many ways simply retrenched the Southern elite and the society they dominated.

Given this conclusion, there is a natural desire to end this piece with a final question: did the South ever decolonialize? Tempting as this question might be, it sadly offers no easy answers. If one returns to the three-pronged definition of colonial status offered in the introductory sections, one can see just how hazy this question becomes. Did the South become less dependent? Well certainly the South became less dependent, but it would be difficult to deny that it does not still have the marks of dependency. Certainly, one might note that no Southern state today still relies upon the production of raw materials as it once had, but it would be difficult to ignore that this has often been replaced by jobs offered predominantly by out of state and international firms. Did the South see the end of the subjugation of its labor force to economic exploitation? Here too it ought to be obvious that though the South has clearly moved beyond the era of sharecropping and debt peonage, there are still undeniable elements of economic subjugation present within the Southern economy. Did the South see the end of political and social subjugation? Here too at best one can argue a matter of scale. Though one might wish to dig into each of these and one could, perhaps the most useful way to close this argument would be to remind that the continuing presence of many of these factors are themselves an aspect of the South’s colonial past. The understanding of the South’s colonial heritage, the ability to understand its antebellum and postbellum origins, the recognition of the challenges which faced the system in the past and the subversion of these challenges is not merely a historiographical exercise, it is a necessary exercise to understand the modern South. 

Photos from Left to Right:

1: John Vachon, Old Barn Used as Bunkhouse for Migrant Fruit Pickers from the South. This Grower Employs Only Unmarried Negroes, 1914-1975, photograph, 384X 285 (pixels), https://picryl.com/media/old-barn-used-as-bunkhouse-for-migrant-fruit-pickers-from-the-south-this-grower

2: Library of Congress, Southern U.S. Cotton Picking, 1920, photograph, 384X304 (pixels), https://picryl.com/media/southern-us-cotton-picking.

Notes

[1] B.B Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South”, Journal of Southern History 8 no. 11 (February 1942): 3; *In recent years, much has been written comparing the nature of Southern society with Western society alongside similar lines as is being discussed within this paper and even in the excerpted speech there is a recognition that Southern and Western interests are more alike than different. As such, this paper does not emphasize the South as an “exception” within the broader American nation but rather as a peripheral colony to a metropolitan empire, a framing which allows not only the West to be included in future analyses but also the various other semi-internal colonies of the American imperial project.

[2] Joel Chandler Harris, Life and Labors of Henry W. Grady: His Speeches, Writings, Etc (London: Cassell Company, 1890), 284-286; In recent years, much has been written comparing the nature of Southern society with Western society, alongside similar lines as is being discussed within this paper, and even in the excerpted speech, there is a recognition that Southern and Western interests are more alike than different. As such, this paper does not emphasize the South as an “exception” within the broader American nation but rather as a peripheral colony to a metropolitan empire, a framing which allows not only the West to be included in future analyses but also the various other semi-internal colonies of the American imperial project. 

[3] Just as this paper points out with Kendrick’s argument, the examination offered within this paper is not a purely novel argument. Perhaps one of the best recent books on the subject is Natalie Ring’s The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State however the actual inspiration for this paper itself came from the recent literature comparing the economic and political systems of the American South to colonial and apartheid South Africa most notably the work of Alex Lichtenstein. 

[4] Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South”, 3. 

[5] Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar, “Colonialism” in The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations, ed. Marcello Musto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 247-265. 

[6] Ronald Horvath, “A Definition of Colonialism”, Current Anthropology 13 no. 1 (February 1972): 46. 

[7] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 84. 

[8] Barbara Arneil, Domestic Colonies: The Turn Inward to Colony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8; Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967), 5. 

[9] Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993), 12. 

[10] Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South”, 3.

[11] Dewey Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 27. 

[12] C Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877—1913: A History of the South (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981), 311.

[13] Mitchell Broadus, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1921), 68. 

[14] Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 146.

[15] Grantham, The South in Modern America, 28. 

[16] Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South”, 3; Flynt, Poor but Proud, 59-60. 

[17] Benjamin Hibbard, “Tenancy in Southern States”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 27 no. 3 (May 1913): 486. 

[18] Arthur Raper and Ira Reid, Sharecroppers All (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 48;Flynt, Poor but Proud, 147.

[19] Ibid, 151-152.

[20] Gerald Friedman, “The Political Economy of Early Southern Unionism: Race, Politics, and Labor in the South, 1880-1953”, Journal of Economic History 60 no. 2 (June 2000): 385-386. 

[21] Perhaps the most notable was WJ Cash in his book The Mind of the South which argued that among other things, a uniquely conservative and hard-working culture existed which precluded the development of unions, an argument which though deeply problematic reflected the effectiveness to which Southern capital had destroyed all previous efforts at unionization to the point of functionally erasing them. 

[22] Flynt, Poor but Proud, 243-244. 

[23] Ibid, 256. 

[24] Michael Perman, The Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 321-324. 

[25] Perman, The Struggle for Mastery, 245. 

[26] For a good example of such an earlier crisis, one can turn to the boll weevil which entered the region in the 1890s and remained a plague throughout the early twentieth century. Not only did the bug threaten the economic prosperity of the region but it also threatened its economic stability, as many cotton-growing sharecroppers and laborers began to move into cities and into the North seeking greater job prospects, a movement which threatened the large body of domestic labor required to make the Southern colonial economy operate. For more about the efforts of Southern elite to contain the weevil epidemic as well as to maintain their control of Southern labor, see James Giesen’s “The Truth about the Boll Weevil”. 

[27] Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 16. 

[28] Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal, 18-19. 

[29] Ibid, 19-29. See also James Tuten, “Regulating the Poor in Alabama: The Jefferson County Poor Farm, 1885-1945” in Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830-1930, ed. Elna Green, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 40-41. 

[30] Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal, 127. 

[31] Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 81-94. 

[32] Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 1-2. 

[33] Donald Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 30-62. 

[34] To be quite clear, in assessing the radical nature of the STFU, this paper is focusing quite strongly on the stated goals of the union especially during its powerful years as a broad coalition, it is not an assessment of the other projects which were adjacent and intertwined into the STFU project nor to the radical nature of its membership. This is merely meant to point out that one of its largest rallying cries was a concern about the nature of established policy rather than any form of systemic challenge to the system, though the STFU would make those at times and its membership was often quite vocal in doing so.

[35] Though no specific section is cited here, Linda Reed’s text, Simple Decency & Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963, provides a strong evaluation of the organization. 

[36] Robert Ferguson, Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 2-4.

[37] Mary Stanton, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 101-103. 

[38] Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal, 128-131 and 43-44. 

[39] Susan Dunn, Planning Democracy, 238-260.

[40] Donald Grubbs, Cry from Cotton, 162-170.

[41] Robert Ferguson, Remaking the Rural South, 79-89 and 165-177.  

[42] Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal, 57. 

[43] Ibid. 

[44] Ibid, 154-156. 

[45] Many readers might be surprised that this section does not instead turn deep into the historiography of Civil Rights and the Civil Rights Movement as an aspect of decolonialization, and though earlier drafts of this paper did do so, this has been removed for a variety of reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, such an examination has already been undertaken quite well not only by recent scholarship but also the contemporary works discussed in the introductory sections of this piece, and as such any such analysis would be incredibly likely to simply be a repetition of these works rather than an addition to them. Second, to have done this historiography justice it would have been necessary to devote larger portions of the text to the question of civil rights from the beginning, a focus which would have shifted the balance offered by this paper. Third and perhaps most important, the nature of this piece has predominantly been economic with a bent towards agricultural and labor policy especially, and though one cannot deny the economic aspects of the Civil Rights movement, it has been deemed better to incorporate the struggle for civil rights within the economic story rather than vice versa, though to be clear this is a purely stylistic preference rather than an interpretive one. 

[46] Emma Folwell, The War on Poverty in Mississippi: From Massive Resistance to New Conservatism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 26-50. 

[47] Dennis Roth, “The Johnson Administration and the Great Society”, 1. 

[48] Roth, “The Johnson Administration and the Great Society”, 1. 

[49] Guian McKee, “’This Government Is with Us’: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980, ed. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Hazijiran (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 31-63 though Johnson’s own disdain for the term is discussed on 47-48. 

[50] Greta de Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice After the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 88-98. 

[51] Tracy K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), 175. 

[52] De Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom, 101. 

[53] Emma Folwell, The War on Poverty in Mississippi, 51-53. 

[54] Ibid, 117. 

[55] For a good example of such recent literature, see Charles Cobb Jr’s This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. 

[56] Wesley Phelps, “Ideological Diversity and the Implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston” in The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980, ed. Annelise Orleck and Lisa Hazijiran (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 87. 

[57] De Jong, You Can’t Eat Freedom, 116-140. 

[58] Emma Folwell, The War on Poverty in Mississippi, 196-210. 

[59] Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), xi-xiii.