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Legacy on the Land: New Deal Resettlement in the Mississippi Delta
by
Jane Adams
D. Gorton

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

We then read “Witness to the Truth” by John H. Scott, the man who had initiated the protest and a subsequent NAACP inquiry. Transylvania, it turned out, had been settled by blacks soon after the Civil War. Here’s the story Scott tells (2003:81-83):
Transylvania, where I lived at the time, was the richest farming area in the parish. In fact, it was actually one of the richest farming areas in the entire state. … The Memphis company that owned the 10,000 acres where I lived mostly left the farming to the black families that had lived in the area for almost a hundred years, back before the end of slavery. The agents hired by the owners to run the place didn’t interfere with us too much, and over time the six-mile strip of property had turned into a thriving, progressive, and thickly settled almost all-black community with its own church, Rosenwald school, and stores.

Negro sharecropper and child who will be resettled, Transylvania Project, Louisiana. Russell Lee, Jan. 1939. LC-USF33-011929-M2
We'll take a brief tour, with Russell Lee, the day people were moved out. Scott continues,

Most families had lived there so long that some people had started to think of the land as theirs, especially the independent farmers. They had developed over the years thriving farms, and even in the 1930s some black farmers already used mechanical equipment and had built nice homes for their families on land they didn’t even own. Many children from the area had been able to go away for their high school education and some had even gone on to college.

…

Typical farmstead near Lake Providence, Louisiana. Russell Lee, Jan. 1939 LC-USF34-031927-D.
Sharecropper's cabin. Transylvania, Louisiana. Russell Lee. Jan. 1939. LC-USF34- 031936-D


So I was really surprised when a white man told me one day that the Farm Security Administration now had possession of the Abston, Crump, & Wynne land. Plans had already been laid to move out all the blacks, about 250 families at that time in 1938, and resell the property to mostly poor whites. …
Shed for mules and horses on sharecropper's place near Transylvania Project. Louisiana. Russell Lee, Jan. 1939. LC-USF34- 031887-D

Chicken shed on former sharecropper's farm. Transylvania, Louisiana. Russell Lee, Jan. 1939. LC-USF34- 031909-D
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