Following this came Pete Daniel in Dispossession in which strives to explain the significant but relatively unknown part of the civil rights movement involving the struggles against institutional discrimination that targeted black farmers in the South and their aptitude to serve as a window into the association between race and government in modern American history. In the years following the Civil War, the number of black farmers in the South grew swiftly.
After the both world wars and the Great Depression, the numbers of farms in general decreased, but not proportionately along the ethnic groups of farmers. What Daniel exposes is the appearance between 1940 and 1964 of a considerably unequal ratio of white-owned to black-owned farms that …show more content…
This practice was accomplished via outward discrimination in the form of voter intimidation and denial of capital as well as restricted access to education about new agricultural technologies that could keep them competitive with the larger white farms. In this meticulously researched and important monograph, Daniel shows that high-ranking officials at the USDA were not only aware of the various forms of discrimination, but they refused to act on them and, in most cases, even acknowledge them. He offers this hypothesis in a direct challenge to scholars who have explained the decline by citing either the structural shift between labor- and capital-intensive farming or by claiming that blacks simply left the South on their own, giving plantation owners no choice but to replace them with machinery. Daniel instead makes the case that the dispossession of black farmers in the U.S. South during these tumultuous decades was much more insidious and had more to do with institutional racism and discrimination than benign economic patterns and shifts in