Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South

In this important work, Domosh explores the challenges faced by agents of the US Department of Agriculture's Black extension service to help improve the farms and lives of Black families in the cotton South, without being seen as a threat to the systems of white supremacy and plantation agriculture that made up its economy. She argues that their actions—negotiating, reworking, and transforming federal mandates—constitute a “quiet and subtle form of resistance” to those systems, and establishes their efforts as rooted in Booker T. Washington's ideology of racial uplift (5). Domosh encourages readers to understand uplift through the end goal of racial equality, and she skillfully makes the case that US Department of Agriculture (USDA) employees like Laura Daly and Thomas Campbell understood their own work as pursuing this aim.Domosh supports her arguments with extensive archival sources, including official reports, photographs, and a USDA film, among others. These sources reveal subtle distinctions in the focus of Black extension workers, who emphasized food production, health care, and farm ownership, in contrast to the lessons of consumption taught by white home demonstration agents at the time. Throughout the work, the author incorporates a number of archival photographs that powerfully illustrate her arguments. In chapter 2, these tell the story of home demonstration agents who taught skills like canning, infant care, and home beautification. Staged work photos embodied the self-help approach of both USDA leaders and advocates of uplift, while before-and-after images highlighted the transformation of unfit living conditions into modern showplaces. Domosh finds ample representation of the “aesthetics of uplift” in her photographic analysis, and her inclusion of a single stunning photo that departs from these norms solidifies her resistance argument (42).Chapter 3 identifies these same aims in the movable school—Tuskegee's mobile classroom based on George Washington Carver's original Jesup wagon—and in it, the author argues that the movable school “both actualized and symbolized uplift” (46). She points out that this was not an invention of the USDA but was developed at Tuskegee with the support of private philanthropists in order to reach “the man farthest down” (49). She further reveals that, over time, the movable school came to function as a kind of uplift propaganda for Tuskegee leaders and for the USDA, carrying different messages to different audiences. One of those messages—subtly embedded—taught that the movable school could help Black farm families transform their own lives and become landowners, thus embodying the eventual goal of uplift.Domosh's fourth chapter situates the New Deal–era resettlement communities as the culmination of a long effort by Tuskegee leaders, Black USDA agents, and private philanthropists to create such communities of African American farmers in the South. In it she argues that the Prairie Farms resettlement community manifested Booker T. Washington's vision for resistance to white supremacy, even as it eventually fell victim to the racism of that system. She emphasizes Washington's aim of home and land ownership as foundational for the eventual goal of racial equality, and she chronicles the earlier efforts toward land ownership—particularly those undertaken by leaders at Tuskegee—as steps in the ongoing process of uplift.Finally, the author examines the use of the Black extension service by elites in the United States and United Kingdom as a model for postwar reconstruction abroad. She argues that their emphasis on “aided self-help” provided a framework for the implementation of liberal development plans, but that their more radical aims—like land ownership—were discarded in favor of a focus on health, stability, and postwar consensus. Through this work she reveals a new perspective, contextualizing historical geographies of contemporary development by rooting them in the racist systems of the Jim Crow South, while highlighting the resistance and transformation of such efforts by local actors determined to provide real aid to the people, and eventual social transformation to the communities at large.The work is deeply thought provoking, and the use of photographic evidence engages the reader in a way that text alone could not. The author's focus on Alabama establishes the key role played by Tuskegee and invites future scholars to expand her line of inquiry, looking for similar patterns of resistance among Black extension agents and home demonstrators in other states.