Abstract
Historians have brought attention to African-American women’s contributions to planning including housing and social service program delivery. This article builds upon that scholarship by adding the work of the Farmers’ Improvement Society and its Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary, both of which were Progressive-era African American mutual aid groups. This article explores the potential importance of these organizations to planning practice and scholarship; sheds light on the unique approach to planning employed by poor and rural people in mutual aid groups; and challenges popular assumptions about similar Progressive Era, “Uplift Movement” groups.
Since Leonie Sandercock first wrote about insurgent planning historiographies in Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History in 1998, planning historians have made significant progress in the area of diversifying planning history, specifically with respect to the contributions of women and people of color. 1 Planning historians in the insurgent historiography tradition have not only chronicled how power and identity served as the nexus at which interventions in the built environment have occurred 2 but also brought to the surface both movements and subjugated knowledge that challenged the definition of what constituted planning. 3 These planning historians have also documented how African Americans and women shaped their built environments outside professions controlled by the “great men of planning” (architecture and landscape architecture) and the state. 4 Other planning historians have critiqued the profession’s role in reinforcing segregation and highlighted African American responses to discrimination. For example, the work of planning historians Clyde Woods 5 and June Manning Thomas 6 has interrogated the manner in which government planning interventions and urbanization reinforced both de jure and de facto racism against African Americans in the forms of zoning and so-called slum clearance. 7 Woods and Thomas’s contributions have caused historians to reflect on both the role of racism in planning and the agency of those who were once thought to be only the objects of planning practices.
In recent decades, still another group of planning historians has recognized the work of African American women within both the Black Women’s Club Movement 8 and mutual aid societies as vital contributions to planning practice. 9 Daphne Spain, for example, sheds light on white female reformers and Black Women Club Movement leaders as creators of redemptive places, framing their work as the foundations for the New Deal and other social service programs while highlighting racial conflicts between the two groups. 10 Other historians of women’s planning contributions illuminate conflicts between white and black women engaged in community building, 11 along with the distinct contributions of African American women who were dedicated to moral and economic progress under the banner of a racial uplift ideology in the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries. 12
Although some planning historians frame early African American uplift movement efforts as “planning from below,” they have not yet integrated the work of intellectual historians who criticize the inequities perpetuated by some racial uplift ideologues. 13 Such authors emphasize both the influence and the newfound freedom attained by women through their mutual aid and uplift movement activities, while paying less attention to upper-middle-class black women’s participation in social surveillance and control 14 through their preoccupation with character reformation and respectability politics. 15 Uplift movements that find their way into planning history reflect primarily—although not exclusively—the contributions of urban women’s clubs and male political groups from the African American community’s college educated and middle class during the Progressive Era. Planning historians have also paid less attention to the histories of rural, working class, agrarian participants (especially women) in the racial uplift movement. 16
This article focuses on one of those neglected southern, rural mutual aid groups—the Farmers’ Improvement Society (FIS) and its auxiliary organization, the Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary (WBA)—and its contributions to planning from 1890 to 1930. 17 Special attention is given to how the FIS and WBA subordinate adherence to moralistic tenets of mainstream racial uplift ideology and how this choice complicates planning historiography’s broad generalizations that all uplift movement groups represent planning from below. 18
First, this article describes rural, agrarian mutual aid associations’ position within the broader racial uplift movement groups and the role of such organizations in the history of African American community building. Second, it offers an explanation of the FIS’s approach to planning and uplift. Third, this article explores how the FIS and its WBA problematized the planning histories of groups with racial uplift ideologies 19 through their de-emphasis of period-specific constructions of social respectability and prioritization of financial independence. I argue that this seemingly passive de-emphasis was subversive 20 because it infused rural women and sharecroppers with a sense of purpose and agency, creating space for people who were often barred from membership in the mainstream uplift movements of the period. I used social historical methods and materials (including family photos and ephemera) to explore FIS women’s impact on organizational leadership, their households, and their communities. A review of the archival data contradicts the prevailing liberal feminist interpretation of FIS history, which ignored poor, rural women’s often subversive and equal role in African American uplift. 21 The work of the FIS and WBA not only adds another multicultural story to planning history but also exposes the subversive and insurgent planning history in both cooperatives and households in southern, rural African American communities.
The Absence of Rural Mutual Aid Groups from Racial Uplift Movement Planning History
The uplift movement arose after the last federal troops left the South in 1877, marking the end of Reconstruction and its associated sociopolitical progress and the beginning of the nadir in race relations. 22 In the absence of federal protection, African Americans vindicated themselves in the face of hostile whites who believed them morally and intellectually inferior. Northern uplift clubs, churches, mutual aid associations, cooperatives, and civil rights organizations established social services, insurance companies, and educational institutions to “uplift” the African American masses. As Jessie Nembhard writes in Collective Courage, although women’s auxiliaries and mutual aid groups formed the building blocks of “Black economic cooperation,” some groups’ underlying racial uplift ideology perpetuated elitist assumptions about which groups should lead and speak for the movement. 23
W. E. B. DuBois, known for his activist—but vindicationist 24 —scholarship on urban African American life, is one of the most well-known uplift movement leaders in insurgent planning history. 25 His community development planning strategy required grooming elite leadership because he believed that African Americans required “social leadership more than most groups,” having “no traditions to fall back upon, no long-established customs, no strong family ties, no well-defined social classes. All of these things must be slowly and painfully evolved.” He agreed with Booker T. Washington, writing that “Education and work are the levers to uplift a people.” Nevertheless, DuBois departed from Washington’s focus on industrial education. The purpose of “Education,” wrote DuBois, was to do more than “simply teach work—it must teach Life” and prepare African Americans for civic life. DuBois believed that the anointed “Talented Tenth of the Negro race”—a few “exceptional men”—“must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.” 26 In contrast, Washington envisioned a popular rural movement and urged southern blacks, both educated and uneducated, male and female to “cast down your bucket where you are.” 27
Women in the DuBois camp often acted in ways that reinforced the social divisions upon which the uplift ideology was predicated. Because the uplift movement sought to unite African Americans, its underlying ideology alienated many due to their social status and physical location. As Higginbotham writes, “On a host of levels, racial uplift stood at odds with the daily practices and esthetic tastes of many poor, uneducated, and ‘unassimilated’ black men and women dispersed throughout the rural South or newly huddled in urban centers.” 28 “The politics of ‘respectability’” 29 writes Higginbotham, “disavowed, in often repressive ways, much of the expressive culture of the ‘folk,’ for example, sexual behavior, dress style, leisure activity, music, speech patterns, and religious worship patterns.” 30 However, several African Americans in the South’s rural Freedmen’s settlements 31 were engaged in organized uplift work; these groups comprised primarily farmers practicing mutual support and self-help in the late 1890s in rural communities far from crowded urban centers and the white gaze.
The Roots of Cooperatives and Mutual Aid Societies in Rural African American Communities
As S. W. Mintz and Juliet Walker maintain, cooperative approaches to community care and political action predate enslavement and emancipation among African American communities that have African roots. 32 The Dahomy, Yoruba, Fon, and Weme all engaged in cooperative economics by pooling funds for funeral expenses. During the late seventeenth century, slaves in America began informal or secret African burial societies. As early as 1780, “free Blacks” created the African Union Society in Rhode Island, which provided funds not only for burial but also for loans and apprenticeships. Walker explains, “Risk sharing was the most prominent feature of these societies,” creating a foundation for black enterprises such as African American insurance companies. 33
DuBois’s “Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans,” published in 1907, referenced the prevalence of economic cooperation and beneficent societies throughout the African diaspora, including in the West Indies. His expansive work broadly examined various manifestations of African American cooperation and support in the form of the Underground Railroad, early free slave societies, postslavery relief societies, and burial societies, among others. According to DuBois, by 1907 mutual aid societies managed a variety of built institutions in urban centers including forty hospitals, between 75 and 100 orphanages, and several banks and insurance groups. 34 Conversely, Booker T. Washington’s uplift philosophy flourished within and outside the context of built institutions, particularly in rural Texas’ black “freedom colonies.”
Freedom colonies—comprising both officially recorded landowners and squatters—were founded by African Americans in Texas who had taken to the woods immediately after emancipation and become squatters, attaining land through adverse possession. From the woods, they found relative safety in the “bottom” land marshes unwanted by whites. Black Texans claimed these wild spaces and made them into communities formed from what Deborah Hoskins characterized as “the weak points in a power structure that whites had not shored up yet, places where whites were not looking, sites that had not yet become important enough to the preservation of privilege that whites cared what Blacks did there.” 35
Most settlements were composed of clusters of agrarian, landowning African American families descended from ex-slaves anchored by cemeteries, churches, and schools. The noted Texas historian Thad Sitton describes these places as … dispersed communities—“settlements,” Southerners often called them—places unplatted and unincorporated, individually unified only by church and school and residents’ collective belief that a community existed. Up in the sand hills, down in the creek and river bottoms, and along county lines, several hundred Texas freedmen’s settlements came into being between 1870 and 1890.
36
At the end of remote roads, along county lines, and down in the river bottoms, few places had been incorporated, or platted, or even properly listed on county maps. These were unofficial places by their very nature, some so much so that the sheriff, or the census taker only rarely intruded on their affairs. In truth, the casual traveler might pass through one of these natural communities without even noticing that a community was there. Infrastructure was slight, and it might be scattered about at different locations in the dispersed community. Almost always there was a church, or churches, and a school; almost always there was a grist mill and a cane mill to produce the community’s survival staples of corn meal and cane syrup; sometimes there was a small steam powered cotton gin, often of the multiple use variety that also ground corn and sawed lumber.
37
Even while resisting the dominant economic system, mutual aid societies operated under the specter of domestic terrorism, economic apartheid, and political repression during a period known as the racial nadir. 40 During the nadir, gains attained during Reconstruction ceased, as white goodwill toward African Americans turned into outright hostility. Mutual aid societies were an essential vehicle for safely mobilizing African Americans within groups that on the surface appeared nonthreatening to whites because their stated purposes (cooperative purchasing, cemetery maintenance) were seemingly apolitical.
Mutual aid societies, particularly those with a cooperative component, dedicated themselves to providing decent burials and keeping blacks out of debt. African American mutual aid societies were critical to community survival when attempts to re-enslave emerged in the form of sharecropping and the crop credit system after Reconstruction ended. “As African Americans sought to define their freedom in the tenancy relationship,” writes Charles Nier, they were without assets sufficient to commence small-scale agricultural endeavors. Invariably, African Americans were “furnished” by the landlord or the merchant with basic food necessities, farming equipment, and the supplies necessary to plant a crop and farmers did not have cash on hand to pay for such items, and the merchant advanced the goods on a fixed credit “limit” established at the beginning of each season.
41
Credit-financed living meant that little money was left over for savings. Without savings, catastrophic events like sickness and death often meant the difference between staying home and a stint in the public almshouse, which hovered constantly over the heads of a people deprived of access to mainstream avenues of social and economic mobility. Mutual aid societies, therefore, were of enormous psychological and social significance to the families of those who paid their annual dues. 44
By the late 1870s and 1880s, several populist farm-based mutual aid societies had arisen in Texas. 45 Some began as part of a short-lived radical, interracial farmer–labor movement. 46 Freedom Colony historians Sitton and Conrad, along with Debra Reid, document the work of several of these societies, including the Colored Benevolent Association and Colored Farmers’ National Alliance. These farmers’ groups participated in strikes and openly contested segregation. 47 The FIS, with its emphasis on cooperative buying, repudiation of the credit system, and land ownership was one of those mutual aid groups that played a role in the development and uplift of agrarian, African American communities in Texas.
The Role of the FIS in Community Development
Discovering the FIS through Social Memory
I first came across the FIS as a mysterious set of initials on the back of my grandmother’s collection of funeral programs (Figure 1). When I first sifted through the funeral programs and family photos, I was researching family history. I asked my grandmother the meaning of the three letters on each program, FIS. Only after my father called several relatives did it emerge that the acronym FIS was the name of our family cemetery. Although the FIS had disbanded by the end of the Great Depression, our family cemetery remains (Figure 2). Fewer than a handful of descendants live within a few miles of the cemetery, with most resettling in a nearby Southwest Houston Freedom Colony called Riceville. 48 Without the photos, programs, and family telephone tree, I might have never made a personal connection to either the FIS or the Freedom Colony.
Farmers’ Improvement Society cemetery internment on funeral program, private collection of Viola Jones, Houston, Texas.
Entrance for Branch No. 358 Farmers’ Improvement Society cemetery, Fifth Street, Fort Bend County, TX. Photo by Andrea Roberts.
This personal connection made the diverse, unique nature of uplift and subversive respectability among women in my family cemetery and throughout the FIS and WBA more tangible. Concurrent with learning about my family’s ties to FIS, I learned about the founder’s role in community building and resistance against the sharecropping system that sought to re-enslave African Americans during Reconstruction.
The Origin and Work of the FIS
The FIS (originally named the Farmers’ Home Improvement Society) 49 created a safety net and economic growth strategy for rural African American communities in Texas, especially in the freedom colonies. 50 R. L. Smith (Figure 3), who was a protégé of Booker T. Washington, founded the organization. 51 Correspondence between the two men supports a claim for their ongoing mentor–mentee relationship. For example, Washington advocated on Smith’s behalf for a Theodore Roosevelt Administration appointment. 52
Robert Lloyd Smith, Farmers’ Improvement Society founder, Smith Cobb Family Collection, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Texas.
Like most uplift leaders, Smith believed in the necessity of African American moral purity and spoke of ethics in relation to achieving economic goals. He succumbed to societal pressure for self-surveillance and in some ways mimicked what he imagined whites would perceive as acceptable behavior and citizenship. The FIS bylaws (Figure 4) reveal Smith’s version of racial uplift. According to historian Merline Pitre, the organization’s rules indicate that “To be responsible in Smith’s view was to accept white values, have a good character, work hard, and accumulate wealth.” 53
Farmers’ Improvement Society bylaws, Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
He urged members of his first chapter, which was located in Oakland, Texas, to do the following: purchase homes, and to urge those already possessed of homes to improve and beautify them; to purchase those things that are absolutely necessary for the comfort of our families; to set our faces against and unite our forces in fighting those evils which debase our character and destroy our homes, the principal of which are gambling, intemperance, and social impurity; to repair our highways and keep them in order; to refrain from spending our time and money upon foolish and harmful projects; to plant suitable shade-trees and shrubbery, and in general to bring up our homes and home life to the highest American standard compatible with our income.
54
Smith soon deduced that any approach to African American uplift or improvement required a sophisticated, counterhegemonic development strategy that would undermine the oppressive relationship between the credit system and rural African Americans. Instead of relying on moral uplift and physical beautification alone, he raised the consciousness of his members around “Old King Credit” or the “crop mortgage system.” 56 The FIS platform, rooted in economic self-sufficiency, was a radical call to resist the system and claim a second emancipation. 57
Smith determined that the crop mortgage system, with credit prices of up to 500 percent above cost, was “the chief obstacle to improvement” and an extension of pre–Civil War chattel slavery. Such prices entrapped African Americans, making it impossible for them to produce surplus or profitable crops. Smith then took steps to reorganize the FIS, beginning with its platform. More specifically, he added components that directly challenged the credit system and promoted financial education, especially among sharecroppers. Seeing positive results among the members, Smith spread his gospel of active resistance to local farm credit systems beyond his Oakland, Texas community. 58
Smith’s self-help message found fertile ground in rural black communities. In 1900, R. L. Smith’s FIS included eighty-six chapters with 2,340 members. By 1911, the FIS had 12,000 members in 800 branches across Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. 59 By 1912, FIS members owned 75,000 acres of land, the Farmers’ Improvement Agricultural College (Figure 5), an overalls factory, and the Farmers’ Bank in Waco. Smith’s first wife also created a female wing of the group called the “Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary,” which specialized in teaching women chicken-farming methods and household budgeting. The WBA played a significant role in implementing Smith’s vision for growth. The FIS (and WBA) survived the Great Depression and African American rural outmigration, and it was not shut down until the doors of the College closed in 1947. 60
Farmers’ Improvement Society College, 1906, Ladonia, Texas, Smith Cobb Family Collection, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Texas.
Like its founder, R. L. Smith, FIS members carried the banner of self-sufficiency and racial uplift 61 through strategies enumerated in the organization’s platform. 62 FIS’s explicitly aspirational platform required that members pledge to oppose the sharecropping and credit system, seek home ownership, learn improved farming methods, foster cooperative buying, and purchase FIS sickness and health benefits. 63 Smith envisioned the FIS as a federation of sustainable chapters that would espouse best farming practices while spurring economic growth in their respective communities.
FIS leadership reinforced its belief in rural black agency at meetings, school and annual convocations (Figures 6–8), transforming members from objects of reform into reformers and planners themselves. The organization’s members dedicated themselves to building self-sufficient freedom colonies (all-black settlements) within a nation that did not afford them full citizenship.
Exhibit of farm products at fair of farmers’ improvements society of Texas. The good of It, Atlanta University Alumni magazine (Atlanta University, 1902).
Convocation and fair of the Farmers’ Improvement Society of Texas, 1890 For the good of It, Atlanta University Alumni magazine (Atlanta University, 1902).
The Healing Hand, Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary newsletter, Smith Cobb Family Collection, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Texas.
Simultaneously, FIS members mimicked a racialized interpretation of citizenship while resisting the system espousing that ideology by rejecting the lure of credit. Smith peppered the bylaws with language of freedom and liberation, indicating that the ghost of chattel slavery still haunted FIS, whose members felt threatened by the systems of peonage that ensnared so many African Americans during Reconstruction and into the Progressive Era. 64
Rejecting the credit system and embracing the FIS platform was a top priority for members. Included in the platform was participation in cooperative buying to cut costs and free up money for home and land purchase. Smith sought innovative approaches to budgeting and saving from among FIS members. For example, one of the organization’s chapters devised an equipment-purchasing scheme with far-reaching implications by saving up to make a group purchase of US$600 worth of supplies. Smith happily reported that “The average indebtedness for supplies fell from over US$70 in 1896 to US$15” in 1899, allowing the group to buy 640 acres and create a US$130 benevolent fund. 65 Smith measured and reported progress based on performance indicators such as acres purchased, number of town lots improved, lower per capita indebtedness, and increased taxable value of property through improvements and beautification. 66
The FIS envisioned not only a route to self-sufficiency but also a sustainable approach to creating communities. Smith was principally dedicated to what today’s community development and planning practitioners would describe as capacity building. The bylaws required that members consider not only individual households but also the highest and best use of resources for the entire community. The organization’s bylaws articulated the expectation that members assume responsibilities within their settlements that today are commonly associated with public works and capital improvement, including tasks such as planting “suitable shade trees and shrubbery [and] establishing schools.” 67 Without access to private or public financial institutions or instruments, Smith and his followers devised their own strategies to stimulate growth. The WBA developed these strategies and educated FIS’ female members on how to execute them.
The Role of the WBA in the FIS
Encountering the WBA and Subversive Respectability through Social Memory
The articles and early twentieth century periodicals that I reviewed gave me some indication of the FIS and WBA’s impact; however, my previously mentioned adventures in family history provided even more insights about the group’s treatment of female members, regardless of their class or educational attainment. Learning about female members of Morningside-FIS Chapter Number 358, which founded my family cemetery, revealed the degree to which the organization accommodated various interpretations of respectability.
Westerfield Tucker O’Neal, a “respectable” woman, is interred at the family cemetery. She was a teacher and university administrator at Prairie View A&M. 68 Her father, James Tucker (Figure 9), who is also buried in the FIS cemetery, was a cemetery trustee. In stark contrast to Ms. O’Neal, local café owner Miss Ruby Brown (Figure 10) challenged traditional ideas of what defined racial uplift women (a respectability ideology). In family photographs, I came across Ruby, a grand aunt whom I never met personally. She is photographed leaning against a Model-T Ford purchased without a man’s assistance. According to family members, Ruby was a large and imposing figure known to buck convention in her dress and behavior. Nevertheless, FIS welcomed her membership fees and buried her alongside single, divorced, and even middle-class women like Ms. O’Neal. Arguably, Ruby further personified FIS principles of self-help and thrift by opening a well-known café for Imperial Sugar refinery workers and purchasing her own land.
Tucker family membership card, Smith Cobb Family Collection, The Texas Collection, Baylor University.
Family photo of Ruby Brown 1928, author’s collection.
Ruby’s independence and rejection of conventional gender norms contradicted descriptions of women in the literature on racial uplift movements. However, it was consistent with the tenets of WBA women, who advocated thrift and economic empowerment. The agency that Ruby embodied simultaneously affirmed (by the accumulation of wealth) and violated (by her inappropriate clothing and marital status) popular constructions of racial uplift promoted by urban middle-class organizations. If “subversion,” as Katherine Rankin defines it, is “ambiguous political agency, individual, and covert instances of nonconformity,” 69 then FIS members such as Ruby Brown represented that unconventionality precisely. After learning about the cemetery and Ruby, I investigated the influence that FIS women had on the organization’s members, specifically through the work of the WBA. The WBA’s efforts to empower communities through financial literacy reflect the group’s influence over FIS leadership and members regardless of sex.
The Role of the WBA in Resisting the Credit System
WBA members exerted influence on the local, national, and household levels. They subordinated respectability politics and social control and exercised the type of power and agency that were essential to advancing subversive aims such as independence from the credit system. 70 As was customary in a time with no governmental provision for social services, women led benevolent organizations. Grounded in collective action, the social networks in African American communities and organizations such as mutual aid societies, churches, lodges, schools, and agrarian cooperative movements all had female counterparts. 71
In 1899, Smith described the WBA members as being “all country folks—ex-slaves and the children of ex-slaves. All of them can read but the two oldest members.” These early chapters, initially twelve in six Texas counties, were the beginning of an intergenerational movement in which “the old slave mother, illiterate but full of hope, and the cultured daughter, organized together for practical purposes.” 72 Smith’s second wife, Ruby Cobb Smith (Figure 11), maintained all of the FIS and WBA finances. 73
Ruby Cobb Smith, wife of Farmers’ Improvement Society founder, Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary leader, Smith Cobb Family Collection, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Texas.
Although called an auxiliary, the WBA played a central role in the FIS. Women in the FIS and WBA exerted agency and power unrestrained by period-specific constructions of gender roles. Specifically, WBA members promoted land ownership and financial literacy, two authentic expressions of power for African Americans in the early 1900s, especially for women. The women’s contribution was to develop household-level implementation strategies for FIS’s organizational goals. Smith continually referred to women in traditional Christian terms—that is, as “helpers.” However, journalistic accounts of the group’s work indicated that the women’s role was considerably more than that of a helpmate. 74 Smith relied on women to keep the organization fiscally sound and manage youth chapters. He also placed women in leadership positions, cited them as proof of the organization’s progress, and saw them as integral to building communities through financial literacy.
The FIS and WBA’s successes attracted considerable national press. On March 19, 1901, at a Tuskegee Institute fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden (Hall), national black leaders offered best practices for making the South’s 10,000,000 African Americans “fit for the duties of citizenship.” During his speech, Smith explicitly mentioned the WBA as a component of his recipe for black success. 75 Less than a week later, the New York Daily Tribune reported that “No other women’s organization in this country, it is probable, has a constitution as unique as the Woman’s Barnyard Auxiliary of the Farmers’ Improvement Society of Texas.” The reporter noted that the organization’s purpose was “a business one, founded not for religious, social, or literary purposes” and had 2,500 members. Grace Johnson of Oakland, Texas, president of the auxiliary, more succinctly stated the group’s goal: “We are after property, new methods, and bank accounts.” Reportedly, members collectively purchased 50,000 acres of land and had a combined wealth of US$700,000. 76
Notably, during the interview, Johnson represented both the WBA and the FIS, promoted the anticredit system platform, and described an evidence-based approach to improvement. “The Barnyard Auxiliary,” she explained to the reporter, “aims to study the nature, habits, needs, and wants of poultry, hogs, cows, and all domestic animals, with a view to improving the stock and putting it with the products of the land on the market in such condition that it shall command a remunerative price.” Women played the role of the organization’s research and development department. Female leadership emphasized financial literacy and profit maximization, not respectability or appropriate behavior.
The agendas of the organization’s annual meetings reveal gatherings similar to present-day academic conferences, with WBA members giving papers on topics such as “The utilization of the Odds and Ends about a Farm,” by G. A. Allen of Kendleton, in western Fort Bend County. Allen extolled the virtue of recycling and repurposing chicken scraps and weeds and turning old clothes into quilts. Others, such as Mrs. Estella Wyatt of Lockhart (near Austin, Texas), wrote position papers: “The Part That Colored Women Can Play in the Agricultural Regeneration of the South.” The women, being intimately involved with farm and home management on the local scale, met to exchange best practices and address more regional trends such as how to take advantage of the fact that dairy and poultry were quickly exceeding the price of cotton by the end of the nineteenth century. 77
The WBA was as dedicated to freeing African Americans from credit-based bondage as its leadership. R. L. Smith, particularly impressed with WBA president Isabelle Smith (no relation to R. L. Smith), used her work as an example of how essential women were to helping their husbands by [f]ighting the greatest curse with which this race has to contend, viz., the credit system. We are helpers not only in producing wholesome food for the tables of our families and properly preparing it, but we feel that our views on the expenditure of the family’s income from any source should be entitled to consideration.
78
Annual budget, from Southern Workman, in October 1900.
In the article, Isabelle Smith noted that a sharecropper’s six-bale cotton crop funded the US$125 annual budget. 80 “With some thrift,” families could forgo some items, including 300 pounds of bacon, to save for a home and land to grow one’s own crops. The same items purchased on credit would cost US$250 and require a thirteen-bale crop. The latter option prohibited saving and property purchases, perpetuating the financial enslavement common among Texas’ African American farmers at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. According to Isabelle, members tested the Auxiliary’s method and found success: “Since the formation of the society and its auxiliaries,” she maintained, “hundreds have bought land and paid for it, and the stock upon these farms is gradually being graded. This is self-help—the kind that stays.” 81
Authors such as Debra Reid argue that R. L. Smith did not see women as equals because they were encouraged to work specific crops and to wield their influence only within the domestic sphere. FIS bylaws did urge members to monitor one another’s conformity to gender expectations. The founding documents indicated that leadership expected female members to personify the FIS principles of home economics and thrift. While the organization was open to either sex, female members were “not allowed sick benefits for sickness peculiar to women that come in the course of nature.” 82 While Reid contends that women must have performed the same roles as men to be equal, I argue that the women and men’s roles in FIS are better characterized as equitable. Smith, at first glance, appeared to stigmatize women as the weaker sex. Yet, I still disagree with Reid, contending that R. L. Smith actually promoted the notion that women were essential actors in the black political economy regardless of age or marital status. This approach created space for women to be full members of the organization. While ostensibly working in the domestic sphere, WBA members interjected their training into family decision-making with regard to finances and real estate purchases, even though such money matters were traditionally male domains during that period. Women’s prominent role in the FIS and WBA indicates that the FIS leadership recognized and prioritized adherence to the organization’s platform over gender roles and respectability politics.
The FIS and WBA’s principles of inclusion, unity, capital accumulation, and resistance created space for those who violated mainstream racial uplift ideology’s tenets and benefited from its financial uplift mission regardless of class. The members believed that this “come as you are” philosophy was a factor in their success. R. L. Smith defended their work as engaging pragmatism over pretense: We have often been accused as a race of being impractical in the use we make of our opportunities, but I think this comes from lack of intelligent and sympathetic direction and leadership. We have no trouble out here in getting folks to take hold of the better way. The greatest need is time to tell them what to do and how to do it.
83
Conclusion
During the Progressive Era, African Americans in both the North and the South embarked on emancipation projects in the face of segregation and racial terror to uplift the race and retain the gains made during Reconstruction. Mutual aid groups and cooperatives, led by both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois, made tremendous contributions to African American improvement or uplift. Whereas those men’s educated, middle-class African American uplift groups’ missions are somewhat visible in planning history, rural, low-income uplift groups in the South and their deviation from mainline uplift ideology are absent. This article shows how the FIS and the WBA focused their efforts less on upholding the conservative, moralistic tenant of racial uplift ideology and more on increasing property ownership rates and building members’ capacity through financial literacy and independence. The FIS and the WBA thus confounded the dominant racial uplift ideology of middle-class, elitist organizations, which reinforced white stereotypes of rural southern blacks as unfit for citizenship and self-governance.
Early twentieth-century periodicals, cemetery headstones and programs, and associated social memory provide evidence of a forgotten history not only of African American resistance to economic apartheid but also of black women’s agency. Demographics of the FIS chapter to which my family belonged, for example, shatter the “respectable-or-not-respectable” dichotomy that dominates much of the history written about the uplift movement’s female leadership in the early twentieth century. Blanket characterizations of black female uplift movement followers as middle-class and married women obscure the diversity in economic class, educational attainment, and marital status among those involved in organizations espousing this philosophy.
To counter this suppression of subjugated uplift knowledge, the history of African American self-sufficiency and agency must include the story of WBA and FIS 84 members who sustained families and communities with their financial acumen and creative resistance to exploitive credit and labor practices. Contrary to those who frame African American women’s work in rural organizations as restricted and submissive, this article argues that women engaged in consciousness raising in the form of community-based financial literacy, academic scholarship, and cooperative purchasing. They freely contested gender norms without fear of exclusion. 85 Furthermore, male leadership supported female leadership acting as financial decision makers who managed resources in a way that enriched households, communities, and thousands of chapters.
Social memory, such as that associated with my own family’s FIS members, provides considerable insights into early twentieth-century African American resistance and agency in rural contexts. Cemeteries and social memory transferred through ephemera and oral history provide opportunities for African Americans to tap into not only family histories but also collective, diasporic “memory work,” creating a bridge from memory preservation to what might be framed as a new political project. 86 These stories are productive nostalgia 87 that can assist researchers by revealing hidden transcripts 88 or patterns of oppression and subversion that persist today.
FIS and WBA members’ subversive ways can inform and enrich historians and preservationists’ efforts in communities where only traces of African American rootedness remain. Studying fissures and stratifications in intraracial class conflict can also help planners understand and explain theories of change, redevelopment, and equity in contemporary African American communities where class divisions remain. 89 Remembering the FIS and the WBA can be an important mechanism in sustaining long-forgotten identities of resistance and subversion.
“Simply adding new stories is not enough,” writes Sandercock. 90 Insurgent planning historiography requires engaging theory and spheres of influence thought to be outside planning. Exposing the paradoxical nature of uplift ideology (elevating some and denigrating others) and its impact on African American community building is essential to assembling a more genuinely insurgent historiography that reflects the intersecting forces of class and gender within planning history.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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