Money  /  Comment

The Black Family, Landownership, and Tobacco Culture

In the US, where less than one percent of the land is owned by black people, Black landownership has historically been a means to challenge economic oppression.

The breakdown of the plantation system post-slavery and the increasing demands for tobacco, coupled with access to cheap land and Black credit institutions, was a set of ideal historical circumstances that allowed Black families to acquire farmland in the Bright Belt. In addition to providing basic food essentials, acquiring farmlands enabled Black families to engage in a tobacco culture that looked markedly different from what existed on white-owned farmland during Reconstruction and the early twentieth century. A poignant example of these historical processes is the way Black farm owners hardly ever hired wage workers to assist in cultivating tobacco. Rather it was the wives and children of Black farm owners who comprised the labor force of the tobacco economy. The centrality of the Black family to tobacco culture is exemplified when examining the labor, and its gender divisions, required during harvest season.

After the 1880s, the process of priming—harvesting tobacco leaves as they ripened rather than all at once—was the primary method of pulling leaves and was arduous labor that required the hands of men and adolescent boys. Preparing the leaves for curing in the tobacco barn was a task delegated to farm women during which they tied the tobacco leaves to a stick and stacked them. Curing the tobacco required the labor of male family members as setting the leaves up for curing called for straddling different levels of tiers that comprised a typical tobacco barn. After the tobacco cured for roughly three days in the barn, farm women graded the leaves for quality before stripping and tying the tobacco in preparation for the market. Families then took their prepared tobacco leaves to the market to not only make money but also to showcase the beauty of their yields. Harvesting tobacco in the Bright Belt was so integral to the culture that the opening of schools in the fall could be delayed, or parents would keep children home from school if there were crops that needed harvesting.1

As farming had been fundamental to the white family power structure for centuries, the Black family also laid claim to occupational farming and, in the process, shaped tobacco culture in the Old Bright Belt. While white landowners tried to prevent landless African Americans from gaining access to landownership as a plot to coerce the latter into tenant farming, aspiring Black farmers in the Old Bright Belt navigated and challenged this rule using their networks to acquire land. The process of farming that land and the shaping of tobacco culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a product of the labor of the Black family as a collective unit. Further, the tobacco culture that emerged during the rise of tobacco in the Old Bright Belt was spearheaded by the Black family as they did not have the same means of production as white farmers.