Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (Volume 14) (Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Commerce)

Historians Of Race, Gender, And Class Will Join Agricultural Historians In Valuing This Careful Examination Of An Understudied Development In A Corner Of The Jim Crow South. Photographs Taken By Agents As Well As Others Commissioned By The Usda Add A Dramatic Visual Record Of The Challenges And Successes Of Employees And Constituents Of The Texas Agricultural Extension Service's Negro Division.--book Jacket. African Americans And Rural Reform In Texas, 1891-1914 -- Forming Separate Bureaucracies : The Negro Division Of The Texas Agricultural Extension Service, 1915-20 -- Segregated Modernization : Taking The Message Into African American Fields And Farm Homes -- Public Reform In Black And White : The Maturation Of A Segregated Division -- Building Segregated Social Welfare : Texas' Negro Division And Roosevelt's New Deal -- Beyond The Farm : Cultivating New Audiences And Support Systems At Home And Abroad -- Separation Despite Civil Rights -- Measuring Greater Harvests. Debra A. Reid. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 257-267) And Index. Jim Crow laws pervaded the south, reaching from the famous "separate yet equal" facilities to voting discrimination to the seats on buses. Agriculture, a key industry for those southern blacks trying to forge an independent existence, was not immune to the touch of racism, prejudice, and inequality. In Reaping a Greater Harvest , Debra Reid deftly spotlights the hierarchies of race, class, and gender within the extension service. Black farmers were excluded from cooperative demonstration work in Texas until the Smith-Lever Agricultural Extension act in 1914. However, the resulting Negro Division included a complicated bureaucracy of African American agents who reported to white officials, were supervised by black administrators, and served black farmers. The now-measurable successes of these African American farmers exacerbated racial tensions and led to pressure on agents to maintain the status quo. The bureau that was meant to ensure equality instead became another tool for systematic discrimination and maintenance of the white-dominated southern landscape. Historians of race, gender, and class have joined agricultural historians in roundly praising Reid's work. Spotlights the hierarchies of class and gender within the extension service. This book demonstrates how the system that enabled the agents and the farmers they served to wield some political influence also kept them dependent on a racialized state that systematically discriminated against them and maintained the white-dominated southern landscape.