Why was the invention of the mechanical cotton picker truly historic?

"In an hour, a good field hand could pick twenty pounds of cotton; each mechanical picker, in an hour, picked as much as a thousand pounds- two bales." (5)

"The invention of the cotton picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of  cotton farming. In 1970, when the migration ended, black America was only half Southern, and less than a quarter rural; 'urban' had become a euphemism for 'black'. The black migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history..." (6)

"The great black migration made race a national issue in the second half of the century- an integral part of the politics, the social thought, and the organization of ordinary life in the United States." (7)

2. Sharecropping (7-21)

Describe the real work a cotton picker did:

Sun up to sunset... $2.00 per hundred pounds... Hunched over all day, avoiding thorny stems, A good picker like Ruby could pick two hundred pounds a day. (8)vs. 75 cents an hour working in a laundry, factory or restaurant in Chicago

Ruby's Family History (9)

So, why hasn't she moved to Chicago already? (sketchy family life...see 8-9)

The Delta (9-11)

Why is the Delta the richest natural cotton-farming land in the United States? (91-10)
Why was it the last land in the South to be settled and cultivated? (10)
When did the cotton industry peak in the South? (1929)

The Institution of Segregation (1875-90) (11-14)

What is the Racist Myth about the origins of sharecropping? (11-12)
What about forty acres and a mule? (12)
What were the real origins of sharecropping? (12-13)

Cotton Crash (1920) (15)

When did the Great Depression come to the Mississippi Delta?

The Lure of Job-Rich Chicago (16)

Plantation Economy (17-20)

How did the owners cheat the sharecroppers who worked the land? (the furnish, seed money, taking up, interest rates the settle.... (18)) 

What recourse did sharecroppers have when they believed that he had been cheated? (19)

What psychological impact did sharecropping have on black families?

3. Ruby's Story from 1916-1938 (21-24) (Think to yourself about why Lemann chose to focus upon Ruby Daniels as the representative of millions.)

Describe Ruby's childhood, teenage and early adult years:

4. Racist Attitudes about Sharecroppers (24-28)

How did whites explain the chaotic nature of the sharecropper family?

How were sexual taboos essential to maintaining the economic system of sharecropping?

5. Sociological Studies of the Sharecropper Family (28-32)

Studies of sharecropper society by Northern intellectuals all rejected the idea of black inferiority but they agreed that family life among sharecroppers was different from the ordinary family life of the rest of the country...(29)

More recent scholarship:

Lemann's Thesis: (31)

6. Ruby in Clarksdale vs. Black Middle Class  (1938-44) (32-41)

How do Ruby's attitudes towards marriage confirm Lemann's thesis (surprise?) (32-34)

What kind of humiliations and threats of violence did Ruby cope with while living in segregated Clarksdale? (pp. 34-36)

• "there weren't any careers open to her except the cotton fields and domestic work. The pay was so low that every respectable white family in the Delta-- even schoolteachers' and mail carriers' families-- had at least one full-time servant..." (34)
• When Ruby was growing up, she was taught to look up to white people, not to hate them. White people ran everything. They lived well. If you were black, you had to get things from white people. Rebellion against segregation was fruitless, so it was for Ruby a subject dealt with in whispers and private feelings. (34)
• In daily life, any resentment that blacks felt for whites was usually kept hidden under a mask of slightly uncomprehending servility that black people knew fit whites' basic picture of them. (36)
• Black men were terrorized by accusations of inappropriate flirtation with white women and even attempted rape. The concequences frequently included lynching.  The Emmett Till case in 1955 is the most famous example of a teenage boy murdered for saying, "Hey, baby." to a white woman.
• Bessie Smith, the great singer who died after a car accident outside Clarksdale in 1937, had been refused admission to the county hospital on grounds of her race, at a time when she could still have been saved.

What was the experience of middle class blacks like in Clarksdale?

• 15 percent of the black population was middle class. In Clarksdale middle class blacks lived seperately from poor blacks: Roundyard vs. Brickyard. 
• "Most of the high school-- and college-educated black people in Clarksdale were in teaching-- "preach, teach, or farm" was the slogan that summarized the black career options" (38)
• "Any black people who had managed to accumulate some money took pains not to put it on display, because it was easy enough for someone deemed a rich, uppity n-word" (36)

What was the attitude of black middle class towards poor blacks?

• In Clarksdale, all blacks lived on the east side of the railroad tracks, and all whites on the west side, but distinct neighborhoods grew up within the black areas of towns. Middle class blacks who had been able to obtain preaching or teaching jobs segregated themselves from the black poor. (37)
• "The catechism of the defenders of segregation ran this way: illegitimate childbearing, the short duration of romantic liaisons, and the constant domestic violence among the sharecroppers and poor blacks in town clearly demonstrated that blacks were sexually uncontrollable." (37)
• The main losers from legal segregation were not the black poor but the black middle class, whose members were educated enough to get good jobs but were denied them by law and by custom. The poor blacks' way of life, in other words, caused the middle-class blacks to suffer the humiliation and economic loss that went with second-class citizenship." (38)  

What was Ruby’s situation in Clarksdale when she gave birth to her first two children?

• "In 1940 Aunt Ceatrice left her husband and moved to the town of Massillon, Ohio, where  some friends  of  the  family were  living. There she met a man from Mississippi named Ulysses Wilkes, and to­gether they moved to Chicago." (39)
• "In 1941, Ruby's husband, W.D. Daniels, was inducted into the Army and left Clarksdale for what was sure to be a long time. Ruby then met and fell in love with a married man named Kermit Butler. Kermit had a good job, driving an ambulance for the Century funeral home in Clarksdale....Even though he was married, Kermit Butler was able to give Ruby a nicer life than she had ever known. Ruby fell in love with Kermit in a way she never had with W.D. Daniels." (39-40)
• "In 1942 Ruby gave birth to a son named George, after her grandfather, George Hopkins, and the next year she had another son named Kermit after Kermit Butler." (40)

What happened to her twin sister Ruth when she moved north?

• In 1944 Ruby's twin sister Ruth left her husband and moved to Massillon, Ohio.
• She lived a much faster life than Ruby-- as Ruby puts it, "it was just party, party, dance and frolic." She drank too much, usually potent and impure home-brew corn liquor. In Massillon Ruth had a miscarriage and never recovered from it. She died in May 1951 at the age of twenty-eight (40)

Why does Ruby start thinking seriously of moving to Chicago?

• "The network of relatives that had sustained Ruby up through adulthood was pretty well gone now. George Hopkins had died in 1944. Her closest kin now was Ceatrice, and Ceatrice was in Chicago. Kermit Butler, despite having had two children with Ruby, was showing no inclination to leave his wife, and that took a lot of the gloss off their romance, to Ruby's way of thinking. Ruby began seriously to consider making the move to Chicago herself." (40)

7. To Move to Chicago? (40-46)

Describe some of the stories that Clarksdale residents heard about how life was different in Chicago. (pp. 40-42)

• Relatives who had moved to Chicago would return to Clarksdale driving a Cadillac and hop out in a new business suit!
• You could find a job in Chicago in a matter of hours: an immediate quadrupling of income, at least, simply by relocating to a place that was only a long day's journey away. (42)
• In Chicago, the migrants said, a black person could go anywhere, and could vote, and was not required to step off the sidewalk so that whites could pass, and was not called "boy," and did not have to sit in the back of the bus. (41)
• Find on the internet and play a song by Muddy Waters-- the most famous resident of Clarksdale to hit it big in Chicago. (p.42)
  

8. White Efforts to Block Emigration End (1940-46) (47-52)

How did whites try to block black emigration north in the years before WWII? (pp. 47-48)

• White planters had begun to soften their treatment of sharecroppers, even hearing grievances, in an effort to stanch the flow of cotton pickers, but they balked at the extensive list submitted by blacks: No good jobs, Cheating at the settle, Lynchings. Being denied the courtesy titles of "Mister" and "Missus." Poor schools, No hospitals, No sidewalks, gutters, or garbage collection in the black neighborhoods. (49)

Beyond the invention of the mechanical cotton picker, what political reasons made whites switch their positions on black emigration north? (pp. 48-49)

• The Decision to Automate: When news got out of the successful demonstration of a mechanical picker, their attitudes changed very quickly. The fear of an incipient civil rights movement (particularly a campain to give blacks voting rights mounted by black GI's veterans of WWII) moved the owners to push as many ex-workers as possible off the plantation. (49)

David Cohn's prediction (1947) (51)

• "Five million people will be removed from the land within the next few years. They must go somewhere. But where? They must do something. But what? They must be housed. But where is the housing? Most of this group are farm Negroes totally unprepared for urban, industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will be their reception at the hands of white an Negro workers whose jobs and wages they threaten?.... What will the effect be on race relations in the United States? Will the Negro problem be transferred from the south to other parts of the country who have hitherto only been carping critics of the South?.... There is an enormous tragedy in the making unless the United States acts, and acts promptly, upon a problem that affects millions of people and the whole social structure of the nation." (51)

Richard Wright's warning (1941) (52)

• "Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone. We, who were landless upon the land; we, who had barely managed to live in family groups; we, who needed the ritual and guidance of institutions to hold our atomized lives together in lines of purpose; we, who had know only relationships to people not relationships to things; we, who had had our personalities blasted with two hundred years of slavery and had been turned loose to shift for ourselves-- we were such a folk as this when we moved into a world that was destined to test all we were, that threw us into the scales of competition to weigh our mettle." (52)

9. Ruby Moves to Chicago (1946) (52-53)

Why did Ruby ultimately decide to move to Chicago?
What kind of life did she find for herself and her children when she moved to Chicago?

10. Uless Carter Moves to Chicago (1942) (53-58)

What made Uless Carter give up on sharecropping and move to Chicago?

• Uless Carter came from a disciplined and hard working farming family. They supplied their own equipment and mules and therefore received a 3/4 share on the cotton they grew and worked hard to earn the money to buy their own land. But the unfairness of the system cheated them out of what they deserved. Eventually, it became clear to Uless that he would never get ahead if he stayed in the South where whites were permitted not only to humiliate blacks but to cheat them of their rightful deserts. He left for Chicago in 1942.