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Justice for the Rural Poor

Library of Congress

Arthur Rothstein: Girl at Gee’s Bend [Artelia Bendolph], 1937

Of the forty-six million Americans in rural communities, more than seven million dwell in stubborn, relentless, abject poverty. They may live in neglected rental properties: a family might be so worried about eviction or a rent hike that they don’t want to call attention to the fact that the oven doesn’t work and the toilet overflows because it’s connected to a failing septic tank. Or they may live in a mobile home that started losing its value the moment it was towed off the lot. The roof and the floors are buckling from water damage. Temperature control doesn’t exist, so the winters and summers are unbearable. And they still owe $15,000 on the damn thing.

The rural poor live with their parents, maybe even their grandparents, and their kids. There is never enough money to cover food and clothes, utility payments, and anything that goes wrong—and something always goes wrong. Checks from the government appear every month for the seniors, sometimes the kids receive meager disability payments, and that’s what keeps the family afloat. Thank God for food stamps. 

States like California and New York have raised their minimum wage to over fifteen dollars an hour, but for the rural poor in Alabama or Mississippi or South Carolina or Tennessee or Louisiana, which have no state minimum wage requirements, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour still holds—as it has since 2009. Even so, there aren’t many jobs to be had in rural America. Working a minimum-wage job means driving to the closest one. That means, in turn, using your earnings to pay for gas and get your car repaired. 

The rural poor are Black or brown or white or Indigenous, and if they share a common history, it is one of generations who haven’t moved much. They live in agricultural communities, or maybe in towns that used to be almost prosperous, thanks to coal mines or factories that have by now been closed for years. Or maybe they live a couple of miles off the interstate, not too far from a city but just far enough to qualify as rural. 

Consider some numbers. In urban areas about 12 percent of residents live below the poverty line, but in rural communities that number increases to 15.5 percent. In the South the rural poverty rate is close to 20 percent; in the Midwest it is thirteen. A shocking 30 percent of rural Black people live in poverty. According to the US Department of Agriculture, which maintains these numbers, poverty has been declining since it was first measured in 1960, but that decline isn’t evenly distributed throughout the country. The highest poverty rates in the US can be found in Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, New York, and my home state, Alabama—where, out of a total population of just over five million, nearly 1.15 million individuals live in rural communities. Of those rural residents, almost 20 percent are poor. 

By every measure the rural poor have worse health and educational outcomes. “Concentrated poverty contributes to poor housing and health conditions, higher crime and school dropout rates, and employment dislocations,” the USDA researchers Timothy Parker and Tracey Farrigan wrote in 2012. “As a result, economic conditions in very poor areas can create limited opportunities for poor residents that become self-perpetuating.” Everyone seems to be sick—with diabetes or heart disease or obesity or asthma. Childhood and maternal mortality rates are higher here than anywhere else in the country.

John Messina/Environmental Protection Agency/National Archives

An abandoned tractor near the banks of the Mississippi River, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1972

Poor rural kids attend the same schools their parents did. They were terrible then, and they’re terrible now. Lockers are rusty, lunches look like fast food, school supplies are limited. For a few young people, education, the military, or sports offer a way out—a path to improve their lot and maybe even offer the rest of the family a measure of relief. But most poor, rural Americans are deprived of their fair share of the American dream, and over the years the gap between them and the urban middle class has widened to the point of lunacy.

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I am the product of Black rural America. I grew up poor in the 1960s, living with other poor people, in an Alabama community where people still used outhouses or, if we needed to relieve ourselves at night, “slop jars” that we emptied the next day. A back injury in his thirties forced my father to retire as a civil servant, but he ran a small business selling fish and watermelons off the back of his truck. My mother worked as a teacher’s aid and drove the bus for students who had special needs.

We did without, but we children were not deprived. We lived a country life, with hogs and a garden, so we ate the freshest food and never went hungry. The neighbors also had gardens, and we shared our produce. Fruit grew on trees, and berries were everywhere. We knew we were poor, but we all believed that there was a way out—a way out of poverty, a way to prosper someplace else. The intention, though, was to come back home and bring that good fortune back to the community.

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My parents were both born during the Great Depression: my father in 1930, when it began, and my mother in 1939, when the alphabet soup of New Deal programs had eased some but far from all the suffering. No one was spared in the economic collapse. The coal miners lucky enough to have kept their jobs made one dollar a day. Milk was eliminated from children’s diets, and many went so hungry, fell so ill, and had so few clothes that school became a distant memory. Horses were still a form of transportation for many rural people, and they often dropped dead from starvation. Figuring out a place to work was an urgent task—but where?

Much has been written about the vast scale of hardship inflicted by the Depression, but one thing stands out to me: the South had an extra dose of suffering. Even at a time of catastrophic national poverty and deprivation, Alabama’s misery was notable. The state had the highest unemployment rate in the South. Per capita, no other city lost as many jobs as Birmingham. Before the Depression, 100,000 people had full-time employment there; after the crash, only 15,000 people did. In 1929 the annual income for an average Alabama family was $311; six years later it was $194. The historian David M. Kennedy, in his book Freedom from Fear, quoted the observations of Lorena Hickok, a newspaper reporter who was close with Eleanor Roosevelt, as she traveled through the South in the midst of the catastrophe. She wrote that Southern farm workers were “half-starved Whites and Blacks [who] struggle in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel.”1

And yet in Lowndes County, where my family lived, the Depression did not exactly divide life dramatically between a time of prosperity and a time of poverty. People here had always lived modestly. They had each other and they had land. They had the skills they needed to survive: emotional ones like resilience, determination, and self-reliance, and practical ones like canning, cultivating small gardens, and sharing what little they had, because when everyone shared, everyone had more. These were strategies and gifts that they had developed over years of being Black people in the South. That they knew how to prosper in adversity made them more resilient when the cataclysm struck.

Even apart from the threat of lynching, indignities organized every aspect of daily life for the region’s Black residents: segregation in schools, workplaces, and public buildings, including shops and restaurants; impassable barriers to voting; soaring infant mortality rates and unreachable health care; a racist justice system, from sheriffs in the smallest hamlets to the state supreme courts, that ruled out anything resembling a fair trial for a Black person. In the 1920s some 750,000 African Americans moved from the South to northern and western cities to escape the systemic racism and terror of Jim Crow. But many, including my family, stayed. In the 1930s four out of five African Americans still lived in the South. Interestingly, when the economic miseries of the Great Depression took hold in northern cities, a small “reverse” migration took place, with some Black families returning to the South under the assumption that they would at least be able to grow some food to survive. Too often, they were wrong.

Library of Congress

Arthur Rothstein: Eroded Land on Tenant’s Farm, Walker County, Alabama, 1937

Both my parents’ families remained in Alabama—my mother’s in Autauga County and my father’s in Lowndes. They never told stories from the Depression, and I suppose their deprivation then was not measurably different from the deprivation that was a fact of their lives. The state, which still mostly depended on cotton as a cash crop, had been in dire economic straits for years. For Black people—many of them illiterate—agriculture was where they found work, along with all its uncertainties and vulnerabilities. Few Black people owned the land they farmed; sharecroppers, both white and Black, worked three-quarters of the land in Alabama.

By the 1920s they had begun to see how imperiled their circumstances were. Cotton crops had been devastated by a boll weevil infestation, and international competition drove cotton prices so low that farm owners passed their losses down to the people who worked the land. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the state’s economy was already in a perilous condition.

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During the Depression, 65 percent of all farmers were tenant farmers, and 39 percent of tenant farmers were sharecroppers. Whereas tenant farmers might own their own equipment or supplies, sharecroppers didn’t own anything they might need for farming. Both, however, were utterly dependent on landlords, and neither had any claim at all on the land they farmed. In both cases white owners charged them for equipment, as well as for basic necessities such as tools, food, clothing, and seed, which the workers bought at white-owned stores. 

The result was an unbroken cycle of debt and dependence. Congress had banned “debt peonage” after the Civil War, but it had never really disappeared, and now it returned with a vengeance. Workers could hardly avoid falling behind on payments for necessities, at which point liens were placed on their crops, depriving them of the only way to pay off their ever-mounting debt. Farm income in Alabama plummeted by more than 30 percent from 1930 to 1933 because the farms produced more cotton than they could sell, plunging tenant farmers or sharecroppers into greater debt and scarcity; some found themselves evicted from the properties on which they had worked for generations. 

*

For some, the military and education offered ways to markedly improve their lives. The military was still segregated, but the mandatory draft meant that many Black men—and even women—enlisted. By 1927, meanwhile, there were seventy-seven HBCUs in the country, educating almost 14,000 students. Many of these institutions were—and still are—in the South. Fourteen of the most notable—among them Tuskegee, Alabama A&M, Alabama State University, Oakwood University, and Stillman—are in Alabama, which has the most HBCUs of any state. Through donations from churches, philanthropies, and prosperous Black communities, these places of higher education not only survived but thrived during the dark years of the Depression. The Department of Education notes that enrollment during this period grew by 60 percent. It grew still more after the war, when the GI Bill paid college tuition and expenses for returning veterans. 

Other forms of improvement arrived via the FDR administration. Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office included a breathtaking series of legislative victories. Fifteen major bills were passed. One of them created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put unemployed men back to work planting trees, bolstering national parks, and fighting forest fires; eventually it employed 2.5 million men. The Public Works Administration, part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, channeled government money into state infrastructure projects like roads and bridges. With the Homeowners Refinancing Act, people in danger of losing their homes were given low-interest loans and refinancing options. Some were appalled at Roosevelt’s efforts and thought that he was pushing the country toward socialism. For others, his measures were reason for fragile optimism. 

Library of Congress

Dorothea Lange: Hoe Culture in the South. Near Eutaw, Alabama, 1936

It was during this time that my family, like others, secured their land. The Agricultural Adjustment Act favored white landowners: when there were funds to be distributed, they went through already-existing white groups in rural communities, which naturally passed them along to other white people. Even as farmland dropped in value, Black farmers found it difficult to access the funding they needed to purchase it, while white farmers and even tenant farmers increased their ownership. And yet during this period about 219,000 Black farmers who had been sharecroppers did come to own their land—and that land wealth, in turn, boosted them into the middle or upper-middle classes. Many of them went on to become leaders in their communities.

In the mid-1930s the Farm Security Administration designed a program to help tenants gain independence as farmers. It involved subdividing massive tracts of land—usually former plantations—and giving Black farmers subsidies for buying them. This is how my father’s great-grandparents were able to buy their land. My parents were just children when Roosevelt was president, but they never stopped revering him.

One of the most notable land purchases was in Macon County, Alabama, about two hours east of Lowndes County. There, in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute, a community known as Prairie Farms was created out of two former plantations. The plan, organized entirely by African American managers, was to have impoverished families from the Black Belt relocate to Prairie Farms. The community had a utopian flavor, with family homes, all of which had septic systems and a cooperative system for farm equipment and the marketing of crops. A kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade school offered hot lunches for students and became a hub for community meetings, health care, adult education classes, and even plays. But World War II put an end to this kind of idealism; the country had other demands to attend to.

*

I will always believe that God led me back to Lowndes. When I became a consultant in economic development for the county in 2001, I was naive about the living conditions of my former neighbors—and this was a community I knew well. At the time, it seemed clear to me that economic development was the secret to launching people out of poverty. I thought that if I succeeded in attracting investment to the area, all else would follow. I did not fully appreciate that the community had no viable infrastructure to attract business, much less residents who could afford the goods and services that businesses depended on.

Only the following year did I discover one of the greatest injustices in our country. A Lowndes County commissioner asked me to visit Mattie and Odell McMeans, who lived in a trailer community with about eighteen family members dispersed among five mobile homes. The family’s septic system was failing, sending raw sewage flowing from their home—and because they couldn’t afford to repair it, they had been threatened with eviction and arrest. One member of the family, the pastor at a small church, cried when he told us that his church had no septic tank at all, as a result of which the local authorities had forbidden him from conducting services. Moreover, if he didn’t fix the problem—at a cost of several thousand unaffordable dollars—he could be arrested. My home state criminalized the failure to provide a septic tank with punitive fines and possible imprisonment.

Fighting for these people’s basic sanitation rights—bridging the gap between the rural poor and the politicians who represent them—would become my life’s work. Once I started in Lowndes County, I saw how widespread the problem was in rural communities throughout the South. It was, moreover, a problem much larger than septic systems, casting an unforgiving spotlight on the government’s fundamental disinterest in rural communities. After all, the residents of these parts of the country tend not to be particularly politically active. No lucrative fundraisers are held where they live, and gerrymandering and isolation have diluted what voting blocs might have existed. Some churches, to be sure, make efforts to get out the vote, but the return on investment for major political parties is relatively low. 

LeRoy Woodson/Environmental Protection Agency/National Archives

A child walking along a creek polluted by the neighboring steel mills near Birmingham, Alabama, 1972; photograph by LeRoy Woodson

Most elected officials and all but a few policymakers have therefore allowed poor rural communities to either die a slow, painful death or become inundated with polluting plants owned by multinational corporations. For some lawmakers, this is a sin of omission; they are simply oblivious to the suffering. Others are aware of it but have decided for whatever reason to prioritize other demands. Still others don’t even want to acknowledge that they come from poor, rural areas themselves. Many of them feel a shame about their humble origins that prevents them from doing anything about the problems these communities face. “By the grace of God I am what I am,” the apostle Paul wrote in Corinthians 15:10. I wonder sometimes, with so many deeply religious lawmakers out there, how many take those words to heart. How many of them make the time to truly see these unassuming lives?

Contending with this sort of indifference, I feel some nostalgia for a time when our government committed to lifting up people who had been beaten down. “Above all, the New Deal gave to countless Americans who had never had much of it a sense of security, and with it a sense of having a stake in their country,” David Kennedy writes. “And it did it all without shredding the American Constitution or sundering the American people. At a time when despair and alienation were prostrating other peoples under the heel of dictatorship, that was no small accomplishment.” The grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s rural Americans were likely grateful for any New Deal program that promised to improve their lives. Who knows what talents their children might bring into the world, if they were only given a chance?

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The last time the federal government meaningfully sought to eradicate poverty in the US was the 1960s. In January 1964, just two months after he became president following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson delivered his first State of the Union address. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” he said. “It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.” All sorts of programs that we now take for granted were launched during these years, among them Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps, now known as the ever-under-assault Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The miracle of Head Start is responsible for higher reading and math scores and long-term educational and social benefits—more stable lives, steady employment, higher educational achievement—for children who attend the program. Social Security benefits were expanded to include children and struggling families.

As he launched this war—the only successful one in his administration—Johnson and Lady Bird showed the country its implications by traveling to Martin County, Kentucky. Poverty in central Appalachia in 1960 was at 59 percent, and by visiting families mired in it, the president gave Congress a reason to vote for and fund the programs he hoped to enact. 

When I read an article about the fiftieth anniversary of his visit, I did a double take. A reporter from USA Today retraced the president’s steps and met a woman who was six years old when Johnson visited, living in a shack with her parents and seventeen siblings. Fifty years later, their lot was somewhat improved, but not substantially. That little girl was now a fifty-five-year-old grandmother living in a two-bedroom trailer in rural Kentucky with her daughter and two grandchildren, all of whom were receiving food stamps and child support. “We’ve progressed in certain areas,” she said. “We do have things like indoor plumbing.”


This essay is adapted from Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope, published today by Spiegel & Grau.

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