Search Results

Using the 1937 Appalachian marriage of nine-year-old Eunice Winstead and twenty-two-year-old Charlie Johns, and the subsequent international attention it received as a prism, this chapter focuses on the persistence of very youthful marriage in the rural southern United States. During the Great Depression, when rates of marriage were down and the age of first marriage increased, minors continued to marry at very high numbers in rural southern states. This chapter argues that isolation, poverty, child labor, poor schooling, and the lack of age consciouness that was its consequence, account for this trend. In communities where calendar age had far less meaning than it did among the middle class and urban residents, white, black and Latino Americans in rural America continued to countenance child marriage in part because they did not see it as noteworthy. Urbanites voiced their horror for the practice in newspapers, magazines, and in film using a language of civilization to condemn those they perceived as backwards barbarians.

This chapter describes the impact of free market economic policies on rural development in the 1980s and 1990s. Seeking to end excessive government interference in the economy, President Ronald Reagan cut taxes, weakened civil rights enforcement, and reduced funding for social programs that served low-income Americans. Reagan believed that private enterprise and market forces were the most efficient mechanisms for creating wealth and distributing resources. Such policies failed to address the problems facing unemployed and poor people in the rural South. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region was still plagued by unemployment, poverty, inadequate health care, substandard housing, and out-migration.

This chapter briefly outlines the history of racial discrimination in the rural South and the ways social justice activists continued the struggle for equality in the decades following the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislation failed to adequately address the economic legacies of past discrimintation, which were compounded by the mass displacement of agricultural workers from the land in the mid-twentieth century. Activists’ calls for government intervention to provide employment, income, education, housing, and health care for displaced workers generated strong resistance from regional elites whose preferred solution to the crisis was for displaced workers to leave. The ideological and political struggles that ensued had consequences for all Americans, not just African Americans, and helped shape national responses to labor displacement during the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism in the late twentieth century.

Chapter Two shows that from the 1910s through the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who initially lived in Texas moved on to the rural black-white South. Of these, the largest group picked the cotton in the Mississippi Delta. From the start, Mexicanos in Mississippi tasted the brutality and exclusion that the region’s white planters had long used to segregate, terrorize, and control African Americans. Mexicanos responded by fighting back in their daily lives, fleeing to new places, and pursuing a political strategy that engaged the cross-border and cross-class nationalism of the Mexican government and its consulate in New Orleans rather than the institutions, lawyers, and liberal discourses of U.S. citizenship. They battled most intensely from 1925 through 1930, the period when many envisioned a future in the Delta. And though most left the area during the Depression, those who remained at long last reaped the fruits of these labors: they forced local officials to admit them to the privileges of whiteness, decisively separating their futures from those of the region’s African Americans and paving the way for their families’ advancement into the white middle class.

The book’s third chapter examines the politics of marriage for formerly enslaved African Americans following the Civil War, in which they gained legal recognition for their domestic relationships. In reviewing the testimonies of formerly enslaved people, one finds a stark divide between those who claimed the custom was as authentic as any other ceremony, against those who, for reasons of self-protection, downplayed the significance or denied the existence of broomstick weddings on their own plantation. Consequently, jumping the broom largely faded from popularity in the postbellum era, but the chapter shows how its memory survived among certain sections of the descendant community. Under unique circumstances, some African Americans continued to practice it throughout the rural South, and other sources reveal that many formerly enslaved people refused to marry using legally-recognized protocols, as they considered the broomstick wedding as legitimate. In certain cases, this caused some couples to reject governmental requirements to remarry. But even for those who rejected it, the colloquial expression “jump the broom” remained in the parlance of Black southerners into the twentieth century. The colloquial expression was important for retaining memories of the ancestral past, and it would help spur its revival during the late-twentieth century.

This chapter brings the story of Liberia into the present. Drawing on memories of current residents, the chapter describes efforts to preserve and present the community’s history to visitors. For example, the original community cemetery is re-discovered, cleared, protected, and interpreted. Newer homes provide refuge for returning relatives or aging kin. Some racist sentiments remain, but overwhelmingly Liberia’s remaining residents fit comfortably into a rural Upstate South Carolina landscape.