Whiteness Owns it, Blackness Defines it

Any examination of schools and schooling in the rural Southern Black Belt must interrogate the enduring logic of plantation politics and examine rural equity work through a racialized lens. We defined rural and identify a rural reality for life in the Black Belt South. Critical Race Theory (CRT) and antiblackness are offered as potential race-conscious theoretical frameworks to a plantation rurality, and we propose an alternative vision of rural education scholarship in the Southern Black Belt that invites space for anticolonial liberation.

Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote extensively about African-American cotton growers and the Southern Black Belt, beginning with the sociological studies he conducted while at Atlanta University. Over time, his approach to these subjects became increasingly literary and experimental. He made the region—and specifically its dirt—a medium for analyzing the history and dynamics of racial capitalism, and for imagining forms of value not grounded in the violent extraction and mystification of black labor power. In doing so Du Bois countered the blame narrative developed by white southerners like Alfred Holt Stone, who attributed soil exhaustion and economic stagnation to the “monstrocity” of self-possessed black labor. He dismantles racist figures of black encumbrance, nomadism, and decay in which antebellum theories of climate determinism were retooled to promote new forms of racial exploitation. This essay analyzes Du Bois’s dirt poetics in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Drawing from Ernesto Laclau’s work on the rhetoricity of Marxist social movements, it examines the revolutionary forms of radical contingency that Du Bois discovers at the intersection of linguistic and economic value.

Utilization of Property Among African American Heir and Titled Landowners in Alabama’s Black Belt

Much of the literature on heir property, or land held in common by heirs without the benefit of a will, deals with its widespread existence, consequences, and problems associated with it in the Southern Black Belt. Little is known about the uses of this property compared with titled property among African American landowners. We address this research gap by using survey data to examine uses of heir and titled properties among African Americans landowners in rural Alabama. Findings indicate that majority of the titled landowners used their land more productively and invest more money in their land than do heir property owners. There is also a higher financial value for titled land than heir property. Heir property owners take more of a short-term and limited financial investment plan that includes annual production of crops and livestock, as well as leases for hunting. Titled property owners, however, take a long-term plan for their land that includes timber, investments in buildings and land, and participation in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) conservation programs.

America's Forgotten People and Places: Ending the Legacy of Poverty in the Rural South: Discussion

These comments discuss the presentations by Christy, Wenner, and Dassie (“A Microenterprise-Centered Economic Development Strategy for the Rural South: Sustaining Growth with Economic Opportunity”) and Freshwater (“What Can Social Scientists Contribute to the Challenges of Rural Economic Development?”) in three sections. These are (1) a brief overview of the Southern Black Belt and its rural development needs, (2) an assessment of the microenterprise-Centered economic development strategy for the rural South, and (3) a quick review of what social scientists can contribute to the challenges of rural economic development. This approach also emphasizes the authors’ background at a historically black land-grant university, and the belief that as goes the Black Belt, so goes the rural South.

Economic Development in Southern Black Belt Counties: How does it Measure Up?

The effects of racial concentration in shaping patterns of development in the rural South during the 1980s is examined focusing on the southern Black Belt (counties in ten southern states). Black Belt counties gained fewer or lost more manufacturing plants and tended to have more routine manufacturing than non-Black Belt counties during 1980–86. But racial concentration had little direct effect on either employment or per capita income growth. Counties with less educated populations (in both groups) had greater growth in per capita income through the influx of low-wage jobs, underscoring the importance of market forces in influencing patterns of development.