Dispossession

Starred review from March 15, 2013

In nine richly detailed and tightly argued chapters, Daniel (The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969), award-winning historian of the U.S. South, exposes the systemic racism that dispossessed 93 of every 100 U.S. black farmers of their land and their livelihood between 1940 and 1974, reducing their numbers from 681,790 to 45,594. While the 1940s Double-V crusade for democracy abroad and at home extended into the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, black farmers were nearly wiped out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in cahoots with agribusiness, Daniel shows. Intentionally twisting federal policy on farm aid, the USDA cut blacks off from credit, information, and public services. Black farmers' $1 billion-plus class-action lawsuit in Pigford v. Glickman (1999) proved decades-long discrimination, as Daniel documents. VERDICT Soberingly revealing the dark underside of an era hailed for black success against racism, Daniel's work exposes sickening, irreparable, racist destruction that compels reconception of popular memories of a generation of civil rights victories. This book belongs in any serious collection on U.S. civil rights, federal farm policy, or 20th-century America.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

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