Rural African Americans and Progressive Reform

Rural African Americans and Progressive Reform DEBRA REID Histories of African Americans in the postbellum rural South tend to depict sharecroppers and tenants as victims of the crop lien system, racism, and the capitalization of agriculture. This paper concentrates instead on rural reformers who celebrated life in the country and believed that comfortable homes, better schools, and wholesome residents could free blacks from bondage. Their agrarian ideology reflected Euro--American influences; most believed in the Jeffersonian rhetoric that linked land ownership to virtue and independence. Because they realized that the crop lien system made property acquisition an impossible dream for most blacks, they advocated diversification and sustainable agriculture as a means to challenge the economic limitations of this system. They pursued reform from their office desks rather than from cotton fields. Some posed political challenges, but most African American agrarians, intent on creating an educated, moral, and thrifty rural population, found that cooperating with white authority furthered their goals. Rural African American landowners looked toward these new leaders for guidance during a period of intense change between the 1880s and World War I.1 Black agrarians undertook reforms as ambiguous as that of their white counterparts. They provided information and inspiration to a small percentage of the Texas population, African Americans who either owned land or enough property to give them some control over their own resources. Yet, the reformers never realized their full potential because discrimination, under--funding, and the abject poverty of most rural blacks limited their effectiveness. In addition, government did little to intervene in local affairs. Black public appointees at the local level remained beholden to white authority figures whose narrow attitudes about race and gender contributed to the further subjugation of the race.2 The objectives and strategies of five reformers active during this period provide the means to compare approaches and to assess the ways that race and gender affected agrarians and public--sponsored reform in the South. Those selected include Robert Lloyd Smith (1861--1942), the founder of the Farmers' Improvement Society of Texas, and his two wives who served as his financial agents, Francis Isabella Isaacs (ca. 1870--1918) and Ruby L. Cobb (1883Cobb ( --1966)). Smith became the first state leader of the "Negro" division of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service (TAES) when it segregated its activities in 1915. Joseph Elward Clayton (1879--1958) became the first African American who organized farmers' institutes under the auspices of the Texas Department of Agriculture in 1917. Clayton's wife, Brittie White, assisted him in fundraising through other endeavors related to vocational education. These reformers' careers encompassed politics, education, business, and philanthropy, and indicate the degree rural blacks became involved in public service in the South.3 Robert Lloyd Smith was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to free parents who

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