Jones has little to say about the psychological and cultural effects of such prolonged oppression of both whites and blacks. She is surely right when she argues that “the desire among men and women for a stable job and a settled home place has transcended class, cultural, and racial lines; the white middle class has had no monopoly on the virtues of hard work, love of family, and a commitment to schooling for their children.” Still, the aspirations of blacks were inevitably withered in a society that confined African Americans to the heaviest, dirtiest, or most servile kinds of work and that demanded their obsequious respect for all whites. Locked in a system of unending debt, paying interest charges as high as 71 percent to plantation stores, black sharecroppers had little experience with money and found it difficult to save for the future. A tenant farmer might seek opportunity during the slack season by “shifting” to a sawmill or phosphate mine, a kind of migration that inevitably weakened some families. But southern society denied blacks virtually any opportunity for developing managerial skills or even, in rural districts, for establishing their own businesses to serve a black clientele. Nor were states that had made it a crime to teach slaves to read enthusiastic about black education. As late as 1940, when the two decades of greatest migration to the North had just begun, five years was the median for years of school completed by blacks in the South; a bare 5 percent of the black population had graduated from high school.
An understanding of poverty in late-twentieth-century America requires some knowledge of the gradual collapse—or modernization—of the old southern plantation economy, the migration northward and westward, between 1910 and 1960, of some nine million white and black workers, and the subsequent decline of the kind of heavy industry that once furnished jobs for such unskilled or semiskilled labor. This is the main subject of Jones’s book, which is especially successful in showing the continuity between the southern plantation regime and postindustrial poverty. She gives a vivid account of the most arduous, dangerous, and degrading kinds of work as she follows migratory men and women from job to job as they worked in turpentine stills, coal mines, coastal canneries, and seafood processing plants. It is startling to read that in this unprecedented emigration from the South, whites outnumbered blacks (even though the proportion of blacks in the South fell from 90 percent to 50 percent). Jones also points out that most of the poor in the US today are white and live well outside the central cities.