Our Land

Our Land tells the story of black Southerners who gained ownership of land and farmed it throughout the era of Jim Crow. Drawing on a new oral history collection and archival research, Adrienne M. Petty and Mark R. Schultz analyze over 300 interviews with farmers and their descendants to better understand how so many rural black families became farm owners despite the considerable odds stacked against them. How did landownership affect their experience of the Jim Crow era? Why did their aspiration for land persist for as long as it did despite the shifting fortunes of farming? And how did acquiring land shape the futures of their descendants? Landownership often allowed these farmers to put down roots and claim a place as their own. It gave them greater control over their own children's labor, which they often used to invest in education. More often than with tenant farmers, landowners' children completed high school, and their grandchildren completed college. This education later bore fruit for many men and women, as they left the farms and sought urban professional or business careers, laying the foundation for the black middle class of today. Although the limited pathways to landownership during this time hardly delivered guarantees of economic security, Petty and Schultz show that the most prosperous members of the landowning class supported institutions that benefited their communities. This book unearths the epic struggle of southern black farmers and reveals that land imbued them with at least the semblance, no matter how fleeting, of independence.