The community had a utopian flavor, with family homes, all of which had septic systems and a cooperative system for farm equipment and the marketing of crops. A kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade school offered hot lunches for students and became a hub for community meetings, health care, adult education classes, and even plays. But World War II put an end to this kind of idealism; the country had other demands to attend to. By every measure the rural poor have worse health and educational outcomes. “Concentrated poverty contributes Customer Reviews Of BooksTime’s Bookkeeping Services to poor housing and health conditions, higher crime and school dropout rates, and employment dislocations,” the USDA researchers Timothy Parker and Tracey Farrigan wrote in 2012.
Justice for the Rural Poor
In urban areas about 12 percent of residents live below the poverty line, but in rural communities that number increases to 15.5 percent. In the South the rural poverty rate is close to 20 percent; in the Midwest it is thirteen. A shocking 30 percent of rural Black people live in poverty. According to the US Department of Agriculture, which maintains these numbers, poverty has been declining since it was first measured in 1960, but that decline isn’t evenly distributed throughout the country. As he launched this war—the only successful one in his administration—Johnson and Lady Bird showed the country its implications by traveling to Martin County, Kentucky. Poverty in central Appalachia in 1960 was at 59 percent, and by visiting families mired in it, the president gave Congress a reason to vote for and fund the programs he hoped to enact.
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- By the 1920s they had begun to see how imperiled their circumstances were.
- A Lowndes County commissioner asked me to visit Mattie and Odell McMeans, who lived in a trailer community with about eighteen family members dispersed among five mobile homes.
- The last time the federal government meaningfully sought to eradicate poverty in the US was the 1960s.
- Even so, there aren’t many jobs to be had in rural America.
- For Black people—many of them illiterate—agriculture was where they found work, along with all its uncertainties and vulnerabilities.
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Fourteen of the most notable—among them virtual accountant Tuskegee, Alabama A&M, Alabama State University, Oakwood University, and Stillman—are in Alabama, which has the most HBCUs of any state. Through donations from churches, philanthropies, and prosperous Black communities, these places of higher education not only survived but thrived during the dark years of the Depression. The Department of Education notes that enrollment during this period grew by 60 percent.
- Social Security benefits were expanded to include children and struggling families.
- Whereas tenant farmers might own their own equipment or supplies, sharecroppers didn’t own anything they might need for farming.
- For some, the military and education offered ways to markedly improve their lives.
- It grew still more after the war, when the GI Bill paid college tuition and expenses for returning veterans.
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Cotton crops had been devastated by a boll weevil infestation, and international competition drove cotton prices so low that farm owners passed their losses down to the people who worked the land. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the state’s economy was already in a perilous condition. I grew up poor in the 1960s, living with other poor people, in an Alabama community where people still used outhouses or, if we needed to relieve ourselves at night, “slop jars” that we emptied the next day. A back injury in his thirties forced my father to retire as a civil servant, but he ran a small business selling fish and watermelons off the back of his truck.
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Only the following year did I discover one of the greatest injustices in our country. A Lowndes County commissioner asked me to visit Mattie and Odell McMeans, who lived in a trailer community with about eighteen family members dispersed among five mobile homes. The family’s septic system was failing, sending raw sewage flowing from their home—and because they couldn’t afford to repair it, they had been threatened with eviction and arrest. One member of the family, the pastor at a small church, cried when he told us that his church had no septic tank at all, as a result of which the local authorities had forbidden him from conducting services.
- One of them created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put unemployed men back to work planting trees, bolstering national parks, and fighting forest fires; eventually it employed 2.5 million men.
- Childhood and maternal mortality rates are higher here than anywhere else in the country.
- But World War II put an end to this kind of idealism; the country had other demands to attend to.
- When the stock market crashed in 1929, the state’s economy was already in a perilous condition.
- By every measure the rural poor have worse health and educational outcomes.
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Moreover, if he didn’t fix gross vs net the problem—at a cost of several thousand unaffordable dollars—he could be arrested. My home state criminalized the failure to provide a septic tank with punitive fines and possible imprisonment. During the Depression, 65 percent of all farmers were tenant farmers, and 39 percent of tenant farmers were sharecroppers.