Generations of farming in Jim Crow's East Texas

Summary

Life following emancipation in the southern United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth century was marked by painful static continuities and contradictions as people worked to dismantle deeply engrained structures and ideologies of white supremacy. The following considers this period of transformation on a local scale, looking at the household consumption choices of the Davis family, members of the Bethel African American community in East Texas. They and their fellow black neighbors were tenants and landowners within a predominately white owned plantation landscape and their engagements with material culture as one means to establish identity highlight the complexity of generational transformations among black farming families during Jim Crow. While urban black settlement and consumption has begun to be explored, the participation of rural black farmers as active consumers remains hidden, particularly in the decades surrounding World War II as product diversity and availability increased and the Civil Rights Movement accelerated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2017   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 127