This article examines the role of credit and its framing by lien and vagrancy laws in the postbellum Mississippi delta. It is argued that the credit system that was established after the abolition of slavery ensured the control of the formerly enslaved population through the institution of “furnishing.” The credit system of postbellum South represented a new mode of control of the bodies of the laborers through a direct and personal control of their necessary labor. This control was nourished by a legal framework that secured the priority of the landowner's share of the crop over the merchant's and the laborer's. Another important dimension of the mode of control over the bodies of the sharecroppers was the vagrancy laws through the restriction of the mobility of the newly freed laboring populations. All these conditions were embedded in a context of structural and direct violence. Further analyses of this history are necessary in order to understand better some of the existing patterns of racialized capitalism in the United States.
AdamsWilliam Hampton, ed. 1980. Waverly Plantation: Ethnoarchaeology of a Tenant Farming Community. Atlanta, GA: Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service. Accessed at: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA127617.pdf.
2.
AllenPeggy Vonsherie. 2009. The Pecan Orchard: Journey of a Sharecropper’s Daughter. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
3.
AlstonLee J.KauffmanKyle D.2001. Competition and the compensation of sharecroppers by race: A view from plantations in the early twentieth century. Explorations in Economic History38: 181–94.
4.
BeckertSven. 2014. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage Books.
5.
BlackmonDouglas A.2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books.
6.
BoegerErnest A.GoldenweiserEmanuel A.1916. A study of the tenant system of farming in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. USDA Bulletin no. 337, January13. Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.108210
BrandfonRobert L.1967. Cotton Kingdom of the New South: A History of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta from Reconstruction to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
9.
BrooksParker MaegenHouckDavis W., eds. 2011. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
CésaireAimé. 2001. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
12.
ClarkThomas D.1946. The furnishing and supply system in Southern agriculture since 1865. The Journal of Southern History12 (1): 24–44.
13.
CobbJames C.1992. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.
14.
DanielPete. 1972. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969. Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
15.
DavisAllisonGardnerBurleigh B.GardnerMary R. (1941) 2009. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
16.
DavisAngela Y.2003. Are Prisons Obsolete?New York: Seven Stories Press.
17.
DavisAngela Y.ShaylorCassandra. 2001. Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex. Meridians2 (1): 1–25.
DickinsDorothy. 1928. A Nutrition Investigation of N---- Tenants in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station Research Bulletins no. 186. Mississippi State: Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. Accessed at: https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/mafes-bulletins/186.
20.
DollardJohn. 1957. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. 3rd ed.New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.
21.
DouglassFredrick.1888. I Denounce the So-Called Emancipation as a Stupendous Fraud. Speech on the occasion of the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of Emancipation in Washington, DC, April16. Accessed at:https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassfraud.html.
22.
Du BoisW. E. B. 2007. Souls of Black Folk. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Federal Writer’s Project of the WPA. 1936. Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. Volume 2, Arkansas Narratives, part 2, Cannon-Evans. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Accessed at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.022/?sp=68&r=-1.153,0,3.306,1.586,0.
25.
GaltungJohan. 1969. Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research6 (3): 167–91.
26.
GenelKatia. 2006. The question of biopower: Foucault and Agamben. Rethinking Marxism18 (1): 43–62.
27.
HarrellAntoinette2014. Department of Justice: Slavery, Involuntary Servitude, and Peonage. New Orleans: Antoinette Harrell.
28.
HodgesJohn O.2014. Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper’s Son. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
29.
KayatekinSerap Ayşe. 1990. A Class Analysis of Sharecropping. PhD thesis. Amherst: Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts.
30.
KayatekinSerap Ayşe. 1996/97. Sharecropping and class: A preliminary analysis. Rethinking Marxism9 (1): 28–57.
31.
KayatekinSerap Ayşe. 2001. Sharecropping and feudal class relations in the post-bellum Mississippi delta. In Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, eds. Gibson-GrahamResnickStephenWolffRichard D., 227–46. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
KirbyJack Temple. 1983. The transformation of southern plantations c. 1920–1960. Agricultural History57 (3): 257–76.
35.
LangsfordEthelbert LeeThibodeauxBen Hur. 1939. Plantation Organization and Operation in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Area. USDA Technical Bulletin no. 682. Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture. Accessed at: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/168454/files/tb682.pdf.
36.
LemkeTomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
37.
LitwackLeon F.1999. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
38.
MandleJay. 1974. The plantation economy and its aftermath. Review of Radical Political Economics6 (1): 32–48.
39.
MarxKarl. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1. New York: Vintage Books.
McCoyJohn Louis. 1970. Rural Poverty in Three Southern Regions: Mississippi Delta, Ozarks, and Southeast Coastal Plain. USDA Agricultural Research Service Report no. AER-176. Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture. Accessed at: https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/CAT87201792.
PercyWilliam Alexander. 1996. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
44.
PruntyMerleJr.1955. The renaissance of the southern plantation. The Geographical Review45 (4): 459–91.
45.
RobinsonCedric J. (1983) 2000. Black Marxism: Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
46.
ShriderEmily A.KollarMelissaChenFrancesSemegaJessica. 2021. Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020. US Census Bureau Report no. P60-273, September14. Suitland, MD: US Census Bureau. Accessed at: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html.
WelchFrank James. 1943. The Plantation Land Tenure System in Mississippi. Mississippi State College Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin no. 843. Mississippi State: Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. Accessed at: https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/mafes-bulletins/843/.
51.
WoodmanHarold D.1995. New South-New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
52.
WoodruffElizabeth Nan. 2003. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
