Land, Promise, and Peril
Race and Stratification in the Rural South

A unique qualitative study of race and economic and social mobility across generations for seven families from the Mississippi Delta.

Mary D. Coleman (Author)

9781009182560, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 April 2023

240 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.784 kg

In Langston Hughes' 'Mother to Son,' (1922), written at a time of dramatic disruption in the American economy and continued tyranny in the lives of Black people, urban and rural, the Mother pleads with the child not to give up. She tells the child that she has been 'a climbing on, reaching landings and turning corners.' Not only did the seven families chronicled in this unique study not give up, while both losing and gaining ground, they managed to sponsor a generation of children, several of whom reached the middle and upper-middle classes. Land, Promise, and Peril chronicles the actions, actors, and events that propelled legal racism and quelled it, showing how leadership and political institutions play a crucial role in shaping the pace and quality of exits from poverty. Despite great odds, some domestics, sharecroppers, tenants, and farmers and their children navigated pathways toward the middle class and beyond.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I. The Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation: 1. Families' cross-century struggles to leave dispossession behind
2. The sunflower county delta
3. Multigenerational injury, insult, and adversity
4. Patterns of dispossession
5. Manufactured and natural disasters
6. Position-taking in the nation
Part II. Family Interiority and Economic Mobility Pathways: 7. Perennial sharecroppers
8. Quasi-croppers
9. The mule-renter
10. The kinship farmers
11. Contemporaries of the second generation of the sunflower seven
12. The central hills family in struggle
Part III. Pathways Toward Upward Economic Mobility: 13. Beyond caste in higher education
14. The war on poverty in sunflower
15. What the scholarship tells us
16. Insights and valedictory
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Economics [KC], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB], African history [HBJH]