Living in the Country: Imagining Development and Remaking the Black Rural South, 1933-1986 Alec Fazackerley Hickmott Redbourn, United Kingdom B.A., University of Sussex, 2007 M.A., University of Virginia, 2010 M.Phil., University of Sussex, 2011 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Virginia May, 2016 i TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii INTRODUCTION Black Politics and Black Power in the Age of Development 1 CHAPTER 1 Questions Liberalism is Incapable of Answering: Economic Problems, Negro Problems, and the Making of the Modern Rural South 33 CHAPTER 2 A Black Southern Strategy: Robert S. Browne, the Emergency Land Fund, and the Struggle for Racial Equity 90 CHAPTER 3 Black Power’s Green Revolution: Cooperatives, International Development and the Modernization of African American Agriculture 143 CHAPTER 4 Representing the Race: Southern Rural Action, Black Domesticity, and the Visual Language of Development 203 CHAPTER 5 Shadows of the Sunbelt: Industrial Development, Small Town Revitalization and the Future of the South in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta 257 CONCLUSION Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go 302 BIBLIOGRAPHY 310 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, the money. This research has been supported at various stages by the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, the Bankard Fund for Political Economy at the University of Virginia, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. The long and rocky road through graduate school would not have been possible without the cohort of friends, colleagues and comrades that, at the end of the day, made the past seven years a time I will forever remember with great fondness. From day one in American History 701-702, there was merriment and anxiety in equal measure alongside Lauren Turek, Kate Geohegan, Emily Senefeld, Brian Rosenwald, Rhonda Barlow and Adrian Brettle. My professional and intellectual development owes much to many. First and foremost, I owe the utmost thanks to my advisor, Claudrena Harold, who has guided me through the maze of graduate school with skill, encouragement, support and a calm that at various stages was so helpful and needed. Claudrena also introduced me to black intellectual history, a move which profoundly changed both my work and, quite frankly, the lens through which I view the world. Reading Du Bois in my first year of graduate school set me down a path that, as many others have discovered, there is no turning back on. I have Claudrena to thank for that. At other stages, I have also benefitted from the advice, critique and encouragement of a number of other faculty. These include Tom Klubock, Sophia Rosenfeld, Gary Gallagher, Cori Field, Julian Bond, and Deborah McDowell. Tom, in particular, I owe much gratitude to. I came to Tom wanting to work iii on labor history; I left a historian of development. That shift could not have happened without my study of Latin American history. Finally, I wish to thank my committee, who were a joy to work with: Andrew Kahrl, Risa Goluboff, and Marlon Ross. Academics, however, is but one part of graduate school. More than anything else, it is the conversations, socializing, commiserating and parties that occurred at 2745 McElroy Drive—“McElroy”—that I will remember the longest. There, I built relationships with many people who I will do my best to remain in touch with as we scatter to the four winds. In no particular order: Elizabeth Kaknes, Trevor Hiblar, Tom Butcher, Ryan Bibler, Anne Daniels, Cody Perkins, Sarah Perkins, John Terry, Nir Avissar, Audrey Golden, Evan McCormick, Ben Davison, Chris Cornelius, Derek King, Severin Knudsen, Emily Moore Knudsen, John “Coo Coo” Collins, Lindsay O’Connor, Zach Hoffman. I am sure I have forgotten some. Nonetheless, graduate school would not have been the same without you all. Collectively, you made finishing possible. I am eternally grateful to you all. An important sidenote: nor would the McElroy community have been the same without a black furry animal that wandered in to the house (and my heart) one warm August day in 2009: Minibeast. Sorry, Mini, for adding two more cats to your life. Finally, I could not have done this without the unwavering support of my family. To my sisters, Morag and Bryony, and my parents, Ivan and Olive, words cannot express how grateful I am to you. Being apart from you all for long stretches has been harder than I’ve ever probably admitted to you. A long time has passed; dogs have been and gone, Rovers have been relegated, and us kids have all become just a little bit more like adults. After all that, being able to share this achievement—and acknowledging your role in it— iv brings me great joy. I look forward to celebrating in person in the very near future. I owe you so much. One other person has become a member of my—and our—family over the past seven years. To Mary, who has been there almost every step of the way. This is maybe not the place where I can say anything that I’ve not said to you before. I hope you know what you’ve meant to me, and this project, over the past six years. Your inspiration, ideas, compassion and kindness are etched in both me and the words on the page. I owe you so much. v There faces the American Negro, therefore, an intricate and subtle problem of combining into one object two difficult sets of facts—his present racial segregation which despite anything he can do will persist for many decades; and his attempt by carefully planned and intelligent action to fit himself into the new economic organization which the world faces. --W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940) There are enormous opportunities here for a new nation, a new Economy, a new culture in a South really new and not a mere renewal of an old South of slavery, monopoly and race hate. There is a chance for a new cooperative agriculture on renewed land owned by the State with capital furnished by the State, mechanized and coordinated with city life. --W.E.B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land” (1947) We are raising fundamental questions … about how the poor sharecropper can achieve the Good Life, questions liberalism is incapable of answering. --Bob Moses (c.mid-1960s) A lot of people return to the South to die—I’m trying to convince people that it’s possible to return here and live. --Charles Bannerman (1978) 1 INTRODUCTION Black Power and Black Politics In the Age of Development On the pages of architectural renderings Soultech rose, like a phoenix from the ashes of southern history, into the verdant surrounds of the North Carolina countryside. The envisioned facility—a gleaming white, high modernist structure that shone in stark relief against the landscape of rural Warren County—was to be the economic centerpiece of “Soul City,” a planned community and brainchild of the former Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) director Floyd McKissick.1 Far more than a utopian community or an exercise in racial separatism, as contemporary critics in the late 1960s and early 1970s claimed, Soul City—with the “industrial incubator facility” at its center—was to signal the beginnings of a broader, black-led effort to bring industrial development to the rural South. In early optimistic projections, it was believed that Soul City would eventually provide over eight thousand manufacturing jobs and support a population of over 45,000 people.2 If successful, the project promised to bring economic growth to a type of space—heavily African American in population, agricultural and for the most part deeply impoverished—that had been bypassed by postwar southern development.3 For its most ardent supporters, Soul City represented a model of development capable of not only 1 For the political history of Soul City, see Devin Fergus, “Black Power, Soft Power: Floyd McKissick, Soul City, and the Death of Moderate Black Republicanism,” Journal of Policy History 22:2 (2010), 148- 192. 2 Warren Regional Planning Corporation, “Industrial and Economic Development Prospectus,” 15 Nov 1972. Box 78, Floyd McKissick Papers, Southern Historical Collection. 3 The seminal treatment of this topic remains Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 2 transforming the terms of black economic life in Warren County, but potentially advancing a more democratic, egalitarian version of capitalist enterprise for the South as a whole. Figure 0.1. “Soultech I.”4 Though Warren County was located only fifty miles northeast of the Raleigh- Durham metropolitan area, it was in most respects a world apart from one of the South’s key sites of postwar economic activity. Beginning in the early 1950s, plans to transform the foundations of North Carolina’s political economy had been initiated by a group that the political scientist V.O. Key identified in his classic 1949 text Southern Politics as the state’s “progressive plutocracy.”5 The cohort, which included a diverse cast of businessmen, politicians, university administrators and southern intellectuals, viewed their state as hopelessly mired in the economic legacies of the ancien régime. The key to North Carolina’s future prosperity, they argued, was to end the state’s continuing 4 “Soultech I,” FMP. 5 V.O. Key, Southern Politics in the State and Nation (New York: Vintage, 1949), 205-211. 3 dependence on low-wage agricultural and textile work. Though a stuttering effort throughout most of the 1950s, by 1959 the coalition had raised the both the capital and political will necessary to establish what would become known as the Research Triangle Park.