Justice for the Rural Poor Catherine Coleman Flowers The New York Review of Books

It grew still more after the war, when the GI Bill paid college tuition and expenses for returning veterans. We lived a country life, with hogs trial balance and a garden, so we ate the freshest food and never went hungry. We knew we were poor, but we all believed that there was a way out—a way out of poverty, a way to prosper someplace else. The intention, though, was to come back home and bring that good fortune back to the community.

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Or maybe they live a couple of miles off the interstate, not too far from a city but just far enough to qualify as rural. Even so, there aren’t many jobs to be had in rural America. Working a minimum-wage job means driving to the closest one. That means, in turn, using your earnings to pay for gas and get your car repaired. We call for the international community to commit to ending the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and to finally pursuing a comprehensive and just political solution in Palestine. Online reputation management for financial firms means strategically managing public perception.

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Other forms of improvement arrived via the FDR administration. Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office included a breathtaking series of legislative victories. 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 virtual accountant employed 2.5 million men. The Public Works Administration, part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, channeled government money into state infrastructure projects like roads and bridges. With the Homeowners Refinancing Act, people in danger of losing their homes were given low-interest loans and refinancing options.

Justice for the Rural Poor

• A shocking 30 percent of rural Black people live in poverty.
• 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.
• At the time, it seemed clear to me that economic development was the secret to launching people out of poverty.
• But most poor, rural Americans are deprived of their fair share of the American dream, and over the years the gap between them and the urban middle class has widened to the point of lunacy.
• They never told stories from the Depression, and I suppose their deprivation then was not measurably different from the deprivation that was a fact of their lives.

Social Security benefits were expanded to include children and struggling families. One of the most notable land purchases was in Macon County, Alabama, about two hours east of Lowndes County. There, in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute, a community known as Prairie Farms was created out of two former plantations. The plan, organized entirely by African American managers, was to have impoverished families from the Black Belt relocate to Prairie Farms.

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• Many of these institutions were—and still are—in the South.
• My parents were just children when Roosevelt was president, but they never stopped revering him.
• The rural poor are Black or brown or white or Indigenous, and if they share a common history, it is one of generations who haven’t moved much.
• 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.
• Both my parents’ families remained in Alabama—my mother’s in Autauga County and my father’s in Lowndes.
• I did not fully appreciate that the community had no viable infrastructure to attract business, much less residents who could afford the goods and services that businesses depended on.

Some were appalled at Roosevelt’s efforts and thought that he was pushing the country toward socialism. For some, the military and education offered ways to markedly improve their lives. The military was still segregated, but the mandatory draft meant that many Black men—and even women—enlisted. By 1927, meanwhile, there were Customer Reviews Of BooksTime’s Bookkeeping Services seventy-seven HBCUs in the country, educating almost 14,000 students. Many of these institutions were—and still are—in the South.

• Lockers are rusty, lunches look like fast food, school supplies are limited.
• Other forms of improvement arrived via the FDR administration.
• By 1927, meanwhile, there were seventy-seven HBCUs in the country, educating almost 14,000 students.
• In both cases white owners charged them for equipment, as well as for basic necessities such as tools, food, clothing, and seed, which the workers bought at white-owned stores.
• My home state criminalized the failure to provide a septic tank with punitive fines and possible imprisonment.
• When I became a consultant in economic development for the county in 2001, I was naive about the living conditions of my former neighbors—and this was a community I knew well.

My mother worked as a teacher’s aid and drove the bus for students who had special needs. The rural poor are Black or brown or white or Indigenous, and if they share a common history, it is one of generations who haven’t moved much. They live in agricultural communities, or maybe in towns that used to be almost prosperous, thanks to coal mines or factories that have by now been closed for years.

• The Department of Education notes that enrollment during this period grew by 60 percent.
• 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.
• Fighting for these people’s basic sanitation rights—bridging the gap between the rural poor and the politicians who represent them—would become my life’s work.
• With the Homeowners Refinancing Act, people in danger of losing their homes were given low-interest loans and refinancing options.
• One of the most notable land purchases was in Macon County, Alabama, about two hours east of Lowndes County.
• The military was still segregated, but the mandatory draft meant that many Black men—and even women—enlisted.

Whereas tenant farmers might own their own equipment or supplies, sharecroppers didn’t own anything they might need for farming. Both, however, were utterly dependent on landlords, and neither had any claim at all on the land they farmed. In both cases white owners charged them for equipment, as well as for basic necessities such as tools, food, clothing, and seed, which the workers bought at white-owned stores. Both my parents’ families remained in Alabama—my mother’s in Autauga County and my father’s in Lowndes. They never told stories from the Depression, and I suppose their deprivation then was not measurably different from the deprivation that was a fact of their lives. The state, which still mostly depended on cotton as a cash crop, had been in dire economic straits for years.

Congress had banned “debt peonage” after the Civil War, but it had never really disappeared, and now it returned with a vengeance. Workers could hardly avoid falling behind on payments for necessities, at which point liens were placed on their crops, depriving them of the only way to pay off their ever-mounting debt. Lockers are rusty, lunches look like fast food, school supplies are limited. For a few young people, education, the military, or sports offer a way out—a path to improve their lot and maybe even offer the rest of the family a measure of relief. But most poor, rural Americans are deprived of their fair share of the American dream, and over the years the gap between them and the urban middle class has widened to the point of lunacy.