Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  14. Quoted material in Pete Daniel, Deepn As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 6.

  15. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 13-16. Chana Gazit, dir., Fatal Flood (Steward/Gazit Productions, 2001), highlighting Leroy Percy and William Alexander Percy’s conflict over the management of flood relief, and Hodding Carter, Lower Mississippi (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1942), chapter 23, on the levee system, are also good sources.

  16. Barry, Rising Tide, 194-201, quotation on p. 192; Daniel, Deepn As It Come, 9.

  17. Daniel, Deepn As It Come, 9, 97, 10. The Red Cross compiled the flood statistics as well as the summary of relief measures in The Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927 (Washington, D.C.: The Red Cross, 1928).

  18. Bessie Smith seems to be the first black music artist to respond in her work to the flood, recording “Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan)” Columbia 143569 (New York, 1927). See also Daniel, Deepn As It Come, 6.

  19. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Rising High Water Blues,” Paramount 12593 (Chicago, 1927).

  20. Barbecue Bob Hicks, “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” Columbia 14222D (New York, 1927).

  21. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, “When the Levee Breaks,” Columbia 14439-D (New York, 1929). The song became most popular at the hands of the English blues-rock band, Led Zeppelin (who credited Memphis Minnie with authorship of the song); see Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks,” untitled album (often referred to as Led Zeppelin IV) (Atlantic A2-19129).

  22. As evidence of the flood’s staying power as subject matter for blues musicians, Casey Bill Weldon devoted three tracks to flooding in his 1936 recording sessions; see “Flood Water Blues No. 1” and “Flood Water Blues No. 2,” Vocalion 03220 (Chicago, 1936).

  23. Carl Martin, “High Water Flood Blues,” Chess 50074 (Chicago, 1936).

  24. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Give Me Black or Brown,” Decca 7391 (Chicago, 1937).

  25. McMillen, Dark Journey, 147.

  26. Patton, “High Water Everywhere, Pts. 1 & 2”

  27. Daniel, Deepn As It Come, 10.

  28. McMillen, Dark Journey, 148.

  29. Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 258.

  30. On the U.S. Justice Department investigation of Leroy Percy, see Gazit, Fatal Flood.

  31. Gen. Curtis Green and Will Percy quoted in McMillen, Dark Journey, 148.

  32. Barry, Rising Tide, 310-16; Daniel, Deepn As It Come, 10-11; and Lemann, Promised Land, 25-26.

  33. Barry, Rising Tide, 317, 320-23, 383-86, 388-89; Daniel, Deepn As It Come, 105, 114, Moton quoted on p. 139, 140-41; and Donald Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites: A Study in Southern Strategies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 3-20. A forgiving account of Hoover’s policies and behavior throughout the flood crisis may be found in Edwin Emerson, Hoover and His Times: Looking Back through the Years (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1932).

  34. Concerning the parameters, or limits, of black participation in American political life, Michael Dawson observed that “the state at all levels has helped define the boundaries of the possible” for black action; see Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 211. See also Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, chapter 1, “The Dusk of Dawn,” 3-33.

  35. Hoover’s position on black civil rights and his hope to restructure the Republican Party in the South were summarized well in Lisio, Hoover, Blacks, and Lily-Whites, xiii-xiv. See also Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 26-28; and McMillen, Dark Journey, 64-66. In Roosevelt’s case, his ambivalence toward direct action on black civil rights was outweighed by his denunciation of lynching as murder, an issue on which Hoover, Coolidge, and Harding had been silent; see Stephen Tuck, review of The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation-keeping from 1831 to 1965, by Russell Riley, Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 283-84. On the shift in black political support from the Republicans to the Democrats during the 1930s, see Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of F. D. R. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era, chapter 5, “Black America and the Coming of the New Deal,” 97-105.

  36. Lemann, Promised Land, 22; Raymond Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1970), ix.

  37. Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression, 9.

  38. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 34-35, quote on p. 35.

  39. Lonnie Johnson, “Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere,” Decca 7388 (Chicago, 1937).

  40. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 35; and Carl Martin, “Let’s Have A New Deal,” Decca 7114 (Chicago, 1935).

  41. Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 133; Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 104-5. See also Otto and Burns, “Tough Times,” 31.

  42. See Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (London: Cresset Press, 1969; citations are to new ed., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 103-6.

  43. Hezekiah Jenkins, “The Panic Is On,” Columbia 14585-D (New York, 1931); and Nehemiah “Skip” James, “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” Paramount 13065 (Grafton, Wisc., 1931).

  44. Tampa Red, “Depression Blues,” Vocalion 1656 (Chicago, 1931); and Charlie Spand, “Hard Time Blues,” Paramount 13112 (Grafton, Wisc., 1931).

  45. Wright, introduction to Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, xiii. The bluesmen’s portrayal of mobility as vagrancy was reinforced by oral histories of young adult transients that indicated that private financial distress and general public dearth—more than other motives such as personal adventure or solid job opportunity—were the main forces that sent hundreds of thousands of Americans on the road during the Depression; see Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move during the Great Depression (New York: TV Books, 1999). Riding the Rails was derived from the oral histories compiled by Uys’s son Michael Uys and daughter-in-law Lexy Lovell for the production of Riding the Rails—a segment of the public television documentary series, The American Experience.

  46. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Road Tramp Blues,” Decca 7589 (New York, 1938).

  47. Barbecue Bob Hicks, “We Sure Got Hard Times Now,” Columbia 14558-D (Atlanta, 1930).

  48. Brownie McGhee, “Red Cross Store,” Library of Congress unissued (1942), transcribed in van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues, 18-19; and Buddy Moss, “Chesterfield,” Columbia unissued (Nashville, 1966).

  49. J. D. Short (Joe Stone), “It’s Hard Time,” Bluebird B5169 (Chicago, 1933).

  50. Big Joe Williams, interview by William Barlow, November 1982, quoted in Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 267.

  51. The best account of the case is Dan Carter, Scottsboro: Tragedy of the American South, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). Carter’s book was produced as a film with the same title by Barak Goodman and David Anker (Social Media Productions, Inc., 2001)], but see also the oral history-based work, Kwando Mbiassi Kinshasa, The Man from Scottsboro: Clarence Norris and the Infamous 1931 Alabama Rape Trial, in His Own Words (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1997). For histories of the communist labor movement and black southerners, see Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, chapter 6, “The Red and the Black,” 139-68; Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communism and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); and Wilson Record, Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964).

  52. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 14-15.

  53. For example, the Scottsboro case rape charges stemmed from the breakdown of segregated space through the commingling of abjectly poor black and white southerners on freight trains. See Dan Carter, Scottsboro, chapter 1, “
Interrupted Journeys,” 3-10.

  54. Kenneth Bindas, All This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPAs Federal Music Project and American Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 72.

  55. On black participation in the Democratic Party, see Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era, chapter 7, “Pressure from the Outside: The Political Struggle,” 152-86.

  56. Frank Freidel, F. D. R and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), chapter 1, “F. D. R: Farmer-Politician,” 1-33. F. D. R. and the South was the revised, printed version of Freidel’s Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, delivered at Louisiana State University, April 1964.

  57. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), 165-70.

  58. Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 185.

  59. Bindas, All This Music Belongs to the Nation, 72.

  60. Franklin Roosevelt, March 12, 1933, quoted in Fireside Chats (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 8.

  61. Patrick Maney, “They Sang for Roosevelt: Songs of the People in the Age of FDR,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23 (Spring 2000): 85-89; and Donald W. Whisenhunt, Poetry of the People: Poems to the President, 1929-1945 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996).

  62. George McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), xi. A Roosevelt biography that highlights the pluralism and inclusivity in his presidency is Patrick Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: A Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Twayne, 1992).

  63. Nathan Miller, F. D. R.: An Intimate History (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1983), 359.

  64. Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 192. McJimsey wrote that “Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was also Eleanor Roosevelt’s presidency”; McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 296. See also Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era, chapter 4, “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Evolution of Race Liberalism,” 76-96.

  65. A good source on the liberal racial mood in the New Deal is Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). See also George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); older, but reliable, is Searle Charles, Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1963).

  66. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era, x, 13; Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 137-38, 186-87; Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 58, 82. On the “Black Cabinet” and New Deal racial reform in general, see Franklin and Moss, Up From Slavery, 346-56; Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era, chapter 2, “Reform and the Black American: Defining Priorities,” 13-47; and Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, chapter 3, “The Start of a New Deal” 58-83. On FDR’s ambivalence toward race reform, see Freidel, F. D. R. and the South, chapter 3, “Roosevelt’s Civil Rights Dilemma,” 71-102; and Freidel, “The South and the New Deal,” in James Cobb and Michael Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 17-36.

  67. There were so many “topical” blues recorded about major, national events during the Roosevelt era that Dutch blues scholar Guido van Rijn has investigated the phenomenon further. He found 349 songs containing significant political comments recorded before 1945. The figure may seem small compared to the total number of blues records made pre-World War II, but it actually represents a significant body of material within topical blues music; see van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues, xv-xvii.

  68. In 1933, the 500,000 wealthiest farmers in the United States (8% of the national total) accounted for 40% of farm income nationally; see Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression, 78.

  69. Transcribed in Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest, 83.

  70. On the New Deal’s impact on southern farming in general, see Pete Daniel, “The New Deal, Southern Agriculture, and Economic Change,” in Cobb and Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South, 37-63.

  71. A good source here is Lawrence Nelson, King Cotton’s Advocate: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

  72. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 186; Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression, 78-79; and Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 52-54.

  73. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 188; and Reinhold Niebuhr, foreword to Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers (New York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1936), iv. On the racial disparities in the distribution of AAA funds and the NAACP protest of the AAA, see Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression, 28-29, 39-55. Roosevelt’s reaction is described in Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 137-38. The Supreme Court overturned the AAA in the U.S. v. Butler case (1936); see Brinkley, The End of Reform, 18.

  74. Sleepy John Estes, “Government Money,” Decca 7414 (New York, 1937).

  75. Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression, 79. Greta De Jong, a historian of Louisiana, has argued that the farmers’ unions inspired African American sharecroppers to better their economic conditions, but landowners’ terrorism against tenant unions and the overall lack of a communist-based union tradition in the rural South limited the unions’ effectiveness at gaining economic autonomy for tenant farmers; see Greta De Jong, “ ‘With the Aid of God and the F. S. A.’: The Louisiana Farmers’ Union and the African American Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era,” Journal of Social History 34 (Fall 2000): 105-39; and Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 137-38. The plantation districts of the Lower Mississippi Valley never gave rise to the broad-based, successful organization of labor unions that grew along the East Coast, where 400,000 textile workers struck in 1934; see Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and The Uprising of’34, film produced by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock (Hard Times Productions, 1995).

  76. On NRA discrimination against African Americans, see Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 54-55; Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 185; Bindas, All This Music Belongs to the Nation, 72-73; and Wolters, Negroes in the Great Depression, part two, “Industrial Recovery and the Black Worker,” 83-218.

  77. Melissa Walker, “African Americans and TVA Reservoir Property Removal: Race in a New Deal Program,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 417-28, 418. On the capture of TVA monies and policy-making authority by local political and economic interests, see Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949).

  78. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 51. Most recent research on the CCC has focused on black Americans living outside the South, so the best general source on the social impact of the CCC remains John Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967).

  79. Washboard Sam, “CCC Blues,” Bluebird B7993 (Chicago, 1938).

  80. Big Bill Broonzy, “Black, Brown, and White,” in Broonzy and Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues, 82-86.

  81. Charles, Minister of Relief, 15-18, 21-27.

  82. Blind Teddy Darby, “Meat and Bread Blues (Relief Blues),” Vocalion 02988 (Chicago, 1935).

  83. Harry Hopkins quoted in George Brown Tindall and David Shi, America: A Narrative History, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1992), 1110; and Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 265.

  84. Walter Roland, “Red Cross Blues,” Banner 32822, and “Red Cross Blues No. 2,” Banner 33121 (New York, 1933). Sonny Scott, “Red Cross Blues No. 2,” Vocalion 02614 (New York, 1933); and Lucille Bogan, “Red Cross Man,” Banner 33072 (New York, 1933).

  85. Walter Davis, “Red Cross Blues,” Bluebird B5143 (Chicago, 1933), and “Red Cross Blues, Pt. 2,” Bluebird B5305 (Chicago, 1933).

  86. Pe
te Harris, “The Red Cross Store,” Library of Congress unissued (Richmond, Tex., 1934).

  87. Speckled Red, “Welfare Blues,” Bluebird B8069 (Aurora, Ill., 1938); Huddie Ledbetter, “Red Cross Store Blues,” Bluebird B8709 (New York, 1940); and see also Ledbetter, “Red Cross Sto’,” transcribed in John Lomax and Alan Lomax, Negro Folksongs as Sung by Leadbelly (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 172-74.

  88. Sonny Boy Williamson, “Welfare Store Blues,” Bluebird B8610 (Chicago, 1940).

  89. Jasper Love quoted in Ferris, Blues from the Delta, 129-30.

  90. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 34.

  91. Martin, “Let’s Have A New Deal.”

  92. Nancy Weiss found dozens of children named Roosevelt in the birth records of Harlem Hospital from 1933 to 1938; see Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 276. On African American voting patterns in 1936, see Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 187, and Franklin and Moss, Up From Slavery, 346.

  93. Many photographs of the works projects under construction and in the finished stage have been archived in the New Deal Network. The archive was developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in cooperation with the Institute for Learning Technologies at Columbia University and may be accessed online at http://newdeal.feri.org/.

  94. Broonzy and Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues, 93; Walter Roland, “CWA Blues,” Banner 33136 (New York, 1934); and Joe Pullum, “CWA Blues,” Bluebird B5534 (San Antonio, 1934). See also Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 67-75.

  95. In Mississippi the works projects funds were almost exclusively channeled into the improvement of white facilities: $8 million to $400,000; see McMillen, Dark Journey, 83-84. On the other hand, workers could expect an average of $15 per week in the form of much-needed cash; see McElvaine, The Great Depression, 153.

  96. Jimmie Gordon, “Don’t Take Away My PWA,” Decca 7037 (Chicago, 1936).