American Agriculturist, September 29,1923 
The Negro in Southern Agriculture 
How a Boy from the Farms of Dixie Views the Greatest Problem of the South 
C OMING from the South and a part 
of the country that is almost prim- 
, itive in its methods of farming in 
comparison with yours, I should in¬ 
deed feel embarrassed if it were my part to 
tell you how we farm with the idea of im¬ 
proving yours. 
I was born and raised on a farm in the 
State of Tennessee and have lived there all 
my life with the exception of three years 
that I have spent at Cornell. It has been a 
revelation to come here to study agriculture 
and to see the great strides you have made 
along these lines and I can see now as never 
before that we of the South who are en¬ 
gaged in farming can be materially bene- 
fitted if we are only willing to admit our 
backwardness and to accept in¬ 
struction from you who are 
much further advanced in the 
school of farming. Knowing by 
now, that I am from the South 
you are perhaps wondering just 
how I am going to treat my sub¬ 
ject. Having lived among and 
associated with negroes all my life 
I have learned to love them and to 
know that there exists among the 
most of you a great misunder¬ 
standing as to how we of the 
South feel toward the negro. 
To my mind the negro problem 
is and always has been an agri¬ 
cultural one and it, is my aim to 
show to you that the success of southern 
agriculture in the future is dependent upon 
an intelligent treatment of the negro race. 
In order to understand more fully the place 
of the negro in our southern agriculture of 
the present as well as the future, it will be 
well to review briefly with you the history of 
the negro race in this country. 
The first negroes were brought into this 
country as slaves and were sold to the New 
England colonists who used them for do¬ 
mestic servants. During the colonial period 
and down to the changes initiated by the in¬ 
vention of the cotton gin, negroes were dis¬ 
tributed with some evenness along the Atlan¬ 
tic coast. Between the date of that inven¬ 
tion and the civil war and largely as a re¬ 
sult of the changes the cotton gin set in 
motion, the tendency was toward a concen¬ 
tration of the negroes in the great cotton 
growing area of the country. Negroes were 
found to be especially adapted to the climate 
and outdoor life that is associated with the 
growingof cotton, and now after they have had 
fifty years of freedom, nine-tenths of them 
preferred to remain in the southern States. 
The far-seeing men of their time realized 
that the institution of slavery was wrong 
and a bitter civil war was fought to settle 
the issue. I am confident that the men in the 
confederate army ^vere fighting for what 
they thought was right and for a good many 
years southern people thought they had been 
done a great injustice. Now that sectional 
differences and hatred have passed away I am 
sure that the southern people are glad that 
the confederacy lost and under no condi¬ 
tions would they want slavery again. 
Over fifty years have passed since the 
Civil War was fought, yet slavery still casts 
a shadow. The South is backward not only 
along agricultural lines but in industry, 
thought, customs and manners. 
At the end of the Civil War the negroes 
were freed, but I am sorry to say only in the 
sense that he no longer had allegiance to pay 
to a master. Picture him if you can without 
land or property of any kind, ignorant and 
poverty stricken, nothing of the past to 
cherish and with but little hope of the future. 
Slavery had not been kind to family life and 
he had not even the love of the fireside. 
By L. B. PRYOR 
Did he sit down and wait to be fed by 
those who freed him or did he seek to de¬ 
stroy those who had formerly been his 
masters? No. He quickly realized that his 
success would come by beginning at the very 
bottom on the land and in the country where 
he had been found to be best adapted. There 
was a great temptation for the negro in the 
radical change from slavery to freedom to 
overlook the fact that he would be able to 
live only by the production of his hands and 
that prosperity and happiness were his if he 
only glorified and put dignity and brains into 
the every day occupations of life. 
The greatest problem in connection with 
southern agriculture is the question of labor. 
This is due to the large size of the farms and 
the kind oT farming practiced. Since the 
time of the invention of the cotton gin. the 
South has been largely dependent upon the 
growth of cotton. The South is in good 
spirits when the price of cotton is up, but 
they never seem to make any preparation 
for the future and one bad year throws them 
entirely upon the mercy of other parts of 
the country. A great part of the land is 
either rented or worked on the share crop 
basis, and the negro who is tenant is not al¬ 
lowed to grow anything else. They know 
how to grow cotton and nothing else, and 
such a thing as diversified farming or the 
rotation of crops is unheard of. The farm¬ 
ers of the South do not even grow enough 
vegetables to eat and it is only the large land- 
owner who is fortunate enough to have a 
cow and some chickens. There is not the 
appearance of permanent farming that you 
have here, and if there are any of you who 
think you are having a hard time I would 
advise you to take a trip through the cotton 
belt. 
We of the South have gone through an ex¬ 
periment of about fifty years in the handling 
of negroes, and we are just beginning to 
realize that our treatment of him has been 
along the wrong lines. We have thought to 
better ourselves by keeping the negro in 
ignorance and poverty, not realizing that he 
would either constitute one-third of the ig¬ 
norance and crime of the South or one-third 
its intelligence and progress. 
The negro was introduced in the South 
because of his particular fitness to the cli¬ 
mate and I do not believe the white man is 
capable of doing as ipuch work in a day 
under that hot sun as the negro. Southern¬ 
ers have a reputation of being lazy that is 
not wholly unwarranted, and I think that if 
many of you spent the summers there you 
would be following the shade around the tree 
like the rest of us. 
Because of the unfair treatment that he 
has received and because of a lack of an 
equal chance of advancement, the negroes 
have almost deserted some of the best agri¬ 
cultural sections of the South. Surely the 
negroes cannot be blamed for leaving, but 
it is an unfortunate state of affairs all the 
way around. 
The white men of the South who are look¬ 
ing towards the importation of those of 
foreign birth, strange tongue and habits to 
replace the negro are making a grave mis¬ 
take, and are taking a backward step when 
they expect the scum of Europe to make 
successful tenants and good citizens. 
We of the South have failed to appreci¬ 
ate the true value of the negro and it would 
be well to consider for a moment his record 
of the past. The negro race has proved be¬ 
yond a doubt that they are trustworthy, 
honest and law abiding. In the Civil War 
when the South was fighting to keep them 
in slavery, did they take up arms against 
their masters? NO. They stayed 
at home to till the fields, 
to look after the women and 
children, and many even followed 
their masters to the field of 
battle. Could we expect more of 
any people? They have cleared 
our forests, tilled our fields,, and 
builded our cities without strikes 
or labor wars, and are we now 
going to show our appreciation 
by driving them out of the coun¬ 
try to make, way for a foreign 
element that will do nothing but 
stir up strife? 
Perhaps you wonder just what 
the country negro of the South 
is like. Of all classes of negroes he is the 
most likable and by far the easiest to 
get along with. He is the most picturesque 
character imaginable and taken as a whole 
they are the happiest people on earth. Over 
75 pei’ cent of them are in the tenant class 
and they live from year to year in their little 
two-room cabins seemingly contented with 
only the essentials of life. They are gener¬ 
ally very ignorant and because of this they 
are kept in poverty. They do not grumble 
about work and it is certainly a pleasant 
sight to see them coming from the field with 
a song on their lips. 
1 know that there exists in the North a 
common belief that the southern white map 
hates the negro, and if I do nothing more 
than show you that this is wrong I will be 
satisfied. In the rural sections of the South 
there is a great warmth of feeling between 
the white man and the negro and I was in¬ 
terested to read of an incident that happened 
in Congress the other day, when a southern 
congressman moved to have a statue erected 
in Washington in honor of the old Southern 
mammy. In my own family we had a negro 
mammy that lived with us for twenty years, 
and when she died there were more white 
people present than negroes, because every¬ 
one that knew her loved her. It has never 
been my privilege to know anyone who lived 
a better life or was more thoughtful of 
others. 
The question of social relationships always^ 
arises when the negro question is discussed. 
Booker T. Washington, one of the greatest 
members of the negro race, forever decided 
this issue when he said: “In all things that 
are purely social we can be as separate as 
the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things 
essential to mutual progress.” 
It is true that in many cases the negro has 
been deprived of the right to vote and rarely 
has been able to vote intelligently. It is our 
duty to prepare him and give him a chance to 
participate in his government. 
The greatest need of the negro in the 
South to-day is education. We of the South 
have thought that education would make the 
negro dissatisfied and unfit for work. It 
seems impossible to teach us that the educa- 
(Continued on page 213/ 
From a Southerner’s Standpoint 
I N a recent issue we published an article entitled, “Hens Can Pay 
Dividends By Sitting?" by William A. Flanagan, who won the first 
prize last winter in the Eastman Public Speaking Contest held an¬ 
nually at the New York State College of Agriculture. 
On this page we are printing the second prize in the same contest. 
We thought it would be particularly interesting to our readers be¬ 
cause it is written by a farm boy from the South, and because re¬ 
cently there has been a great exodus of the negroes from the South 
to our northern cities. 
