Moreover, if he didn’t fix the problem—at a cost of several thousand unaffordable dollars—he could be arrested. My home state criminalized the failure to provide a septic tank with punitive fines and possible imprisonment. During the Depression, 65 percent of all farmers were tenant farmers, and 39 percent of tenant farmers were sharecroppers.
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Fourteen of the most notable—among them Tuskegee, Alabama A&M, Alabama State University, Oakwood University, and Stillman—are in Alabama, which has the most HBCUs of any state. Through donations from churches, philanthropies, and prosperous Black communities, these places of higher education not only survived but thrived during the dark years of the Depression. The Department of Education notes that enrollment during this period grew by 60 percent.
- Congress had banned “debt peonage” after the Civil War, but it had never really disappeared, and now it returned with a vengeance.
- 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.
- 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 employed 2.5 million men.
- “It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won.
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The community had a utopian flavor, with family homes, all of which had septic systems and a cooperative system Certified Bookkeeper for farm equipment and the marketing of crops. A kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade school offered hot lunches for students and became a hub for community meetings, health care, adult education classes, and even plays. But World War II put an end to this kind of idealism; the country had other demands to attend to. By every measure the rural poor have worse health and educational outcomes. “Concentrated poverty contributes to poor housing and health conditions, higher crime and school dropout rates, and employment dislocations,” the USDA researchers Timothy Parker and Tracey Farrigan wrote in 2012.
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Only the following year did I discover one of the greatest injustices in our country. A Lowndes County commissioner asked me to visit Mattie and Odell McMeans, who lived in a trailer community with about eighteen family members dispersed among five mobile homes. The family’s septic system was failing, sending raw sewage flowing from Customer Reviews Of BooksTime’s Bookkeeping Services their home—and because they couldn’t afford to repair it, they had been threatened with eviction and arrest. One member of the family, the pastor at a small church, cried when he told us that his church had no septic tank at all, as a result of which the local authorities had forbidden him from conducting services.
- Only the following year did I discover one of the greatest injustices in our country.
- Through donations from churches, philanthropies, and prosperous Black communities, these places of higher education not only survived but thrived during the dark years of the Depression.
- Poverty in central Appalachia in 1960 was at 59 percent, and by visiting families mired in it, the president gave Congress a reason to vote for and fund the programs he hoped to enact.
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- Once I started in Lowndes County, I saw how widespread the problem was in rural communities throughout the South.
Cotton crops had been devastated by a boll weevil infestation, and international competition drove cotton prices so low that farm owners passed their losses down to the people who worked the land. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the state’s economy was already in a perilous condition. I grew up poor in the 1960s, living with other poor people, in an unearned revenue Alabama community where people still used outhouses or, if we needed to relieve ourselves at night, “slop jars” that we emptied the next day. A back injury in his thirties forced my father to retire as a civil servant, but he ran a small business selling fish and watermelons off the back of his truck.
