Paper given at the Joint Meetings of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society, Boston University, June 7-11, 2006

[1] See (Baldwin 1968, Gilbert 2003, Roth n.d.) Roth, Dennis, Chapter 2. The New Deal.in Federal Rural Development Policy in the Twentieth Century. http://www.nal.usda.gov/ric/ricpubs/rural_development_chap2.pdf accessed and downloaded 6/2/06.

[2] In most, if not all, the RA communities, land was owned by a cooperative made up of the families living on the project, with individual parcels leased to individual families. Lake Dick, perhaps the most industrial of the projects, was settled as a village with cotton and corn land leased to individual members and feed crop land and livestock enterprise operated cooperatively (Hearings before the Select Committee of the House Committee on Agriculture, to Investigate the Activities of the Farm Security Administration. House of Representatives, 77ith Congress, 1^st sess, part 2, June 7 to July 2, 1943. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.)Tabulation based on a survey of acreage and units of subdivided plantations, plat books in county courthouses [list counties inventoried].

In most, if not all, the RA communities, land was owned by a cooperative made up of the families living on the project, with individual parcels leased to individual families. Lake Dick, perhaps the most industrial of the projects, was settled as a village with cotton and corn land leased to individual members and feed crop land and livestock enterprise operated cooperatively (Hearings before the Select Committee of the House Committee on Agriculture, to Investigate the Activities of the Farm Security Administration. House of Representatives, 77ith Congress, 1^st sess, part 2, June 7 to July 2, 1943. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.)

[3] Nicholas Natanson, in his study of FSA Photography, "The Black Image in the New Deal," argues that the FSA photographers were in general more sensitive to race than other photographers of the period, inside and outside the government. New Deal and redistribution, and other tangible benefits, however, went disproportionately to whites.

[4] Perman, Michael. 2001. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South 1888-1908. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.

[5] Adams, Jane and D. Gorton, 2006. Confederate Lane: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta. American Ethnologist 33(2):288-309. 2006

[6] On the slide of whites into tenancy, see Woofter 1936:11-12; see also Raper 1941, 1943. Blacks were also sliding downward, but a smaller proportion of Southern blacks had ever been able to climb the ladder from wage labor or sharecropping to property ownership. While agrarian concern focused on family farmers, in the cotton South the line between "planters" and "farmers" was a fluid one, with only the largest plantation owners relying entirely on non-family labor in the fields.

[7] An East Carroll Parish site lists email addresses for "LakeviewMayor" and "HendersonMayor" http://www.eastcarroll.net/information.shtm (accessed 7-2-06)

[8] Woofter (1936:30) used Mydans’ photographs of Sunflower Plantation to illustrate a typical plantation.

[9] Nelson, Lawrence J. 1999. King Cotton’s Advocate: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

[10] The importance of the FSA Tenant Purchase Projects in creating a rural white enclave south of Greenville, Mississippi, centered on a majority-white school, is explored in Adams and Gorton, Confederate Lane: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta. American Ethnologist 33(2):288-309. 2006.