Southern farmers, black and white

Melissa Walker's latest work, "Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History," is a must read for oral historians, those interested in the history of farming in the South, and those who value a narrative theoretical orientation in making sense out of our lives.

Her concepts of memory, community of memory, and the meaning of change are provocative ideas and are spelled out in well-written chapters. In one particular section, she writes of "leaving the land: landless and landowning prewar whites" and then addresses the Black farmer under the section "racial oppression, the federal government, and leaving the land." That section is worth a careful read to those who care about the Black farmer.

Her work is based upon 475 interviews with 531 people all retrieved from various archival sources, an amazing volume of material. Her intention as an oral historian is not to sort out truth or falsehoods, "but rather to consider the shape of the memory stories and to explore what the shape of those stories tells us about the storyteller and his or her world (p. 3)."

Admitting that African American farmers are under-represented in her archival search, she does tell the stories of several African American farmers including Eugene Webster, Annie West, William Rucker, Welchel Long, James Hall and his wife, Mary Shipp, Taft Bailey, and James Lewis.

After the litany of ways in which Blacks were marginalized by comparison to the Whites, Dr. Walker writes the following: "African Americans told their stories about deciding to leave the land differently than their white neighbors, and their stories indicted the racist systems that disadvantaged black farmers. Some were thrilled to quit farming, and they were happy with the financial security they found through off-farm jobs and the improved social and material life in town. Others expressed bitterness at the forces that made it impossible for many blacks to remain on the land even as white neighbors farmed successfully. Regardless of whether they found satisfaction or disappointment in leaving the land, African Americans nonetheless talked about racism-including institutionalized racism practiced by federal agencies-as a contributing factor to their decisions to stop farming (pp. 163-164)."