Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

  • 4 - Patterns of Dispossession

  • from Part I - The Family in an Intemperate Community, State, and Nation
  • Mary D. Coleman, Economic Mobility Pathways
  • Book:
    Land, Promise, and Peril
    Published online:
    15 April 2023
    Print publication:
    20 April 2023, pp 62-90

  • Summary

    As Powdermaker found, many of the families she examined and all the families in my work—working black poor, landed farmers, and Jack -- professed Christian faith. All were actively engaged in church and all desired marriage. Like the sharecropping poor, the landed Byrd patriarch, the quasi-croppers and the mule-renter’s son highly valued marriage, Christian faith, savings and a comfortable home. Often, the black poor and the non-poor shared the Sunday morning religious spaces, some sang in the same choirs and served on the usher board, not because they were members of the same caste, but because they were first and foremost Americans and Christians---imbued with a sense of American’s promise, not just their own. Faith and faith discourses allied them as a community—as a people—with the nation.

Land, Promise, and Peril
  • Race and Stratification in the Rural South
  • Mary D. Coleman
  • Published online:
    15 April 2023
    Print publication:
    20 April 2023
  • In Langston Hughes' 'Mother to Son,' (1922), written at a time of dramatic disruption in the American economy and continued tyranny in the lives of Black people, urban and rural, the Mother pleads with the child not to give up. She tells the child that she has been 'a climbing on, reaching landings and turning corners.' Not only did the seven families chronicled in this unique study not give up, while both losing and gaining ground, they managed to sponsor a generation of children, several of whom reached the middle and upper-middle classes. Land, Promise, and Peril chronicles the actions, actors, and events that propelled legal racism and quelled it, showing how leadership and political institutions play a crucial role in shaping the pace and quality of exits from poverty. Despite great odds, some domestics, sharecroppers, tenants, and farmers and their children navigated pathways toward the middle class and beyond.