The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present.

AuthorMinow, Martha

With the passing of Justice Thurgood Marshall, this nation has lost not only a man who truly made history, but also a man who knew history and knew it mattered. His attention to history crucially served his pursuit of racial and social justice, for history supplied details about how oppression works and how human experiences and institutions simultaneously change and stay the same. For those moved by Justice Marshall's legacy, renewed attention to history can spur devotion to the struggle to include the excluded, and it can guide those struggles with reminders about the complexities of human experience.

For reminders and for spurs, reading The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present is one place to start. The historical details of impoverishing circumstances are more powerful than the book's comments on the current scene. In The Dispossessed, award-winning author Jacqueline Jones(1) extensively documents the dislocations of the most impoverished Southern Americans - both black and white - during the economic transformations that accompanied the Civil War, the World Wars, and the Depression. Jones provides thick, factual details about sharecropping and peonage labor, phosphate mining and migrant labor camps, government practices, and survival strategies pursued by individual families facing an economy moving from agriculture to industry and from local to global. She wants to locate the "underclass" in a history of national and worldwide economic change, which displaced whole groups of workers from the mainstream economy (pp. 205, 271, 287).

Jones wants to use this history to comment on current claims that poor people deserve their poverty because they lack the virtues which promote hard work and thus perpetuate a culture of dependency (pp. 27, 291-92). She also wants to challenge the image of the underclass as African American; in its place she offers a story of poor Southern whites and blacks who share experiences of economic exploitation and dislocation (pp. 1-2, 174-75).

By her own acknowledgment, however, blacks continuously faced harsher circumstances and more invidious oppression than whites (pp. 110-11, 128-29, 140-55, 163-64, 233-34). In addition, the book does not systematically address the "culture of poverty" argument, nor does it address what portion of the population did not fit Jones' story about individuals and families desperately seeking work. I do not disagree with her critique of the culture of poverty but only note that this critique is not the book's strong Suit.(2)

Indeed, the strength of The Dispossessed lies in its details, details garnered from government documents, oral histories, and an array of archival and secondary sources. The author's concerns about public debate over the "underclass" neither capture nor contain these details. A better way to summarize the details is to marshal them to address the central theme of dislocation: Why did so many poor Americans find themselves moving from place to place during the past century-and-a-half? In what way is it fair to describe this dislocation - as chosen or imposed? As dispossession? I will use this review as a chance to offer this summary and to invite readers to consider how such history can guide future struggles for social justice.

  1. Why Did People Move?

The Dispossessed paints a picture of poor Southern Americans moving - from plantation to plantation, from plantation to city, from South to North, and back again. Ultimately, some nine million people, white and black, migrated from South to North between 1910 and 1969; in 1910, ninety percent of all blacks lived in the South and, by 1960, as many blacks lived in the North as in the South (p. 205). Jones convincingly identifies the multitude and variety of reasons and contexts for such movement. The quest for autonomy by former slaves and the effort by whites to distinguish themselves from blacks led individuals and families to change jobs and homes after the Civil War (pp. 14-15). The simple search for more favorable work conditions influenced many who moved (p. 26). Some moved to resist employers who wanted to impose employment terms resembling slavery.(3) Others moved to avoid total dependency on hugely oppressive work conditions such as those in coal and phosphate mines.(4) Many moved to take seasonal jobs, such as picking crops (p. 167), or to seize occasional opportunities, such as construction projects (p. 225) or wartime factory work (p. 226).

According to Jones, families frequently settled accounts at the end of a period of agricultural employment only to find that they had made barely any cash, given the employer's terms on debts or the employer's fraud (pp. 116-17, 124, 191). A congressional representative from North Carolina reported in 1901 that "[t]here is a great deal of fraud...

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