Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

These agricultural workers paid $8.00 apiece to be driven by truck
to a work camp at Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 1942.
subsidies so that they could hold on to the land and continue
serving as U.S. imperialism's overseers in the
Afrikan South.* But those U.S. imperialist subsidies
literally gave the planters cash for each sharecropper and
tenant farmer they forced off the plantation. The primary
effect, then, was to forcibly de-stabilize and eventually depopulate
the rural Afrikan communities. One 1935 evaluation
of the A.A.A. program by the lawyer for the Southern
Tenant Farmers Union pointed out.
"Before its passage most of the plantations of the
south .were heavily mortgaged. It was freely prophesied
that the plantation system was breaking down under its
own weight and that the great plantations would soon be
broken up into small farms, owned by the people who
cultivate them.. .but by federal aid the plantation system of
the South is more strongly entrenched than it had been for
years.
"However, this is not the most significant effect of
the federal aid. By it cotton acreage was reduced about 40
per cent, andsomething like 40per cent of the tenants were
displaced.. . " (33)
Afrikan miners and their families were driven out by the
tens of thousands. The large coal companies and the
United Mine Workers Union (UMW-CIO), while they had
class differences, had oppressor nation unity. The imperialists
had decided to drive rebellious Afrikan labor out
of the Southern coal fields, and the pro-imperialist CIO
unions eagerly cooperated. Between 1930 and 1940 the
percentage of Afrikan miners in the five Southern Appalachian
states (Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, West
Virginia and Kentucky) was deliberately cut from 23% to
16%. (34) And it would keep on being cut year after year,
regardless of economic boom or bust.
The drive by capital to strike down Afrikan labor,
to force the colonial masses out of the main economy, intensified
throughout the 1930s. Between 1930-36 some
50% of all Afrikan skilled workers were pushed out of
their jobs. (35) Careful observers at that time made the
point that this was not caused by the Depression alone, but
clearly reflected a strategy used by imperialism against the
Afrikan Nation as a whole. W:E.B. DuBois said in the
main address of the 1933 Fisk University commencement
ceremony:
This displacement was also taking place in the fac- "We do not know that American Negroes will surtories
and even the coal field, where (as we noted in the vive. There are sinister signs about us, antecedent to and
previous section) Afrikan workers had played a leading unconnected with the Great Depression. The organized
role in militant unionization. As the coal mines of the might of industry North and South is relegating the Negro
South gradually became unionized during the 1930~~ 110 to the edge of survival and using him as a labor reservoir