Women in the Rural South: Scraping a Living from Two-bit Jobs

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 5-8

Southern working class women are survivors. No message emerges as vividly from the stories in this booklet, Picking Up the Pieces. All of these women scraped their livings out of rocky soil and two-bit jobs; all got by on little but their own muscles and wits. Many bore children at a young age, and struggled for the better part of their lives to put food in their mouths and shoes on their feet. All endured the personal insults, self-doubt and, in several cases, physical violence that are the lot of women in this country; many faced the additional barrier

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of racial abuse and discrimination. Their stories are not romantic or pretty; poverty is neither. But they are stories of great courage, humor and strength in the face of formidable odds.

These women are but one generation in a long succession of southern women with similar stories to tell. The history of women’s survival in the South is bound up with the history of agriculture, which remained the foundation of the region’s economy until well into the present century. The first women to eke their livings out of the southern earth were of course Native American. Encroachment and enslavement by European settlers shattered their traditional way of life, but members of the Cherokee, Lumbee and other tribes have survived, especially in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Native Americans were the first of many rural people in the region to be dispossessed of their most precious economic resource–land. They were also among the first to be enslaved in the labor system for which the South became known.

The eighteenth century saw the flourishing of plantation agriculture in the South, based on the labor of African women and men. Although slavery was formally abolished in 1863, the reorganization of agriculture into the sharecropping system ensured the continued poverty of most black families. Concentration of land ownership in the hands of a white upper-class minority denied economic opportunity to successive generations of rural Southerners. Women–both black and white–labored long and hard in cotton fields and on tobacco farms, but remained for the most part landless and in debt.

Industrialization came to the South on a large scale during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Mines, mills and factories proliferated amidst regional fanfare over the construction of a “New South.” Allocation of the new industrial jobs according to race and gender established a pattern of occupational segregation that is visible to this day. Hard pressed to secure an adequate labor force in the rugged Appalachian mountains of the upper South, coal operators sought workers of all races and nationalities–but hired no women. In the more densely settled piedmont to the South, textile mill owners preferred the low-wage labor of rural white women and originally children. They refused to hire black workers, save for a few menial jobs, though certain other southern employers, such as tobacco processors, relied heavily on black labor. All segregated their workers by race and gender into distinct physical locations and job categories. Coupled with enforced social separation under Jim Crow, occupational segregation maintained a divisive hierarchy of opportunity among Southerners who were increasingly members of the same working class.

Southern women’s present economic status reflects the persistent, detrimental impacts of their segregation into low-wage, often labor-intensive jobs. In the coal-dependent economies of east Kentucky, southern West Virginia and areas further south, women are largely excluded from the most important source of high-wage employment industry, the mining industry. As a result, they have few economic opportunities and extremely low labor force participation rates: in 1984 in West Virginia, 39.2 percent of adult women were in the labor force, the lowest rate of any state in the nation. Over the last ten years, women have fought successfully to gain access to mining jobs; today, however, many coal miners–including most women–are unemployed.

In the piedmont counties of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, women remain concentrated in the low-wage manufacuring industries where they were first employed one hundred years ago. Nearly two-thirds of southern textile and apparel workers are women, and the great majority are rural. Today, women of all races find employment in the mills, but they receive some of the lowest wages in the country for their efforts. In 1983, average earnings in the apparel industry were $5.37/hour, about half the average in manufacturing industries like chemicals and primary metals, where men predominate.

As is true throughout the United States, the rapid growth of the southern service sector has been based on the labor of women. For black women, dependence on service jobs is nothing new; they were long consigned to domestic service, the lowest wage job in the nation. As recently as 1960, nearly half of all employed black women in the South were domestic servants. Many now engage in a commercialized variation of the same activity; they are cooks in restaurants, maids in hotels, laundresses in hospitals. Over one-third of all employed black women in the South work in the service sector.

Southern white women, by contrast, are more heavily concentrated in pink collar ghettos of retail sales and office work. In the urban South, slightly more than half of employed white women are cashiers, secretaries,

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and related workers. In the rural areas of the region, the larger role of manufacturing somewhat offsets dependence on these sectors, though nearly 40 percent of employed rural white women are secretaries and sales clerks. The higher status of this pink collar work does not necessarily bring a higher wage or greater job satisfaction. Southern women of all races often earn scarcely more than the minimum wage: in 1984, half of those with any income at all received less than $6,700 a year; among those who worked full-time the entire year, half earned less than $14,312. Median earnings of black and Hispanic women were over $2,000 a year lower than those of white women.

As the lowest paid workers in the lowest wage region of the country, southern working class women bear a heavy burden of poverty. Their role as caretakers of children magnifies their economic needs and spreads the implications of their poverty to the next generation. Poverty is most severe among those who experience the intersecting discrimination of class, race and gender: working class black women who are single mothers with young children. Over sixty percent are poor. Other southern women of all races live constantly on the margin between destitution and survival–one month unemployed and down to the last dollar, another month with a small paycheck and an uncertain job, yet always without genuine opportunity.

Women survive despite their lack of economic resources by using skills passed down for generations. This is true not only of those who live in remote areas on the margins of the wage economy, but also of women in “developed” locations who work hard for wages yet always remain poor. Both produce and circulate with their neighbors the goods and services necessary for their families’ survival: they patch and sew, swap child care, watch for sales and clip coupons; in rural areas, they also garden, raise chickens and perform other agricultural tasks. In general, women have learned to substitute their own hard work for the commodities that they cannot afford to buy.

Women who have made much out of little may have to do with even less in the future. Current economic trends do not bode well for southern women, especially those in rural locations. Fueled by international competition and the loss of markets, US corporations are engaged in a global search for reduced production costs; their strategies include technological innovation, relocation to lower wage areas, and sometimes a combination of both. For workers, the domestic impacts of this economic transformation include unemployment, irregular work and lowered wages. Labor-intensive manufacturing has been especially hard hit; this is precisely the industrial sector that once favored the rural South and the labor of southern women.

These trends are apparent in mining and manufacturing industries throughout the South. In West Virginia, for example, the unemployment rate has topped all other states’ for over two years. Technological innovations in underground mining, coupled with declining markets for certain grades of coal, have drastically diminished employment in the coalfields. Women who once worked in the mines now stand in unemployment lines with former waitresses and secretaries from the boarded-up businesses of rural county seats. Further south, women who worked in the textile and apparel industries also find that jobs are scarce. Bankruptcies, plant closings and layoffs have swept through the piedmont during the past ten years. Between 1973 and 1983, the work force in textiles and apparel dropped nationwide by over 500,000. Although advocates for protectionist trade policies assert that “unfair competition from producers in Southeast Asia” is the source of declining employment, the situation is far more complex.

Large corporations in the textile industry have transformed the production of cloth from fiber. Since the mid-1970s, they have brought robots, electronic knitting machines and other technological innovations into the mills; the result has been rapidly rising productivity and wide-spread displacement of workers. Although it is true that textile imports have boomed in recent years, they are by no means the sole cause of unemployment. The US textile industry is undergoing a massive shakeout: less productive mills are closing; less well-capitalized companies are going bankrupt. Meanwhile, the larger producers are concentrating production in modern, relatively automated plants. Manufacturers of apparel have taken a different approach to the pressures on international competition. Although some have invested in new, highly productive technologies, many have roamed the globe in search of cheap labor, and have found it among poor women in Hong Kong, Mexico, Taiwan and elsewhere.

Some producers have even found they no longer need to leave the United States to take advantage of Asian and Hispanic women’s cheap labor; there is evidence that rising immigration and high unemployment rates have enabled a return of the sweatshop to cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Women laid off from textile mills and garment factories rarely find a job in the new manufacturing industries that have recently located in the South. Since

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World War II, businessmen in heavy industries have been drawn by the region’s low wages, nonunion work force and accomodating political tradition, which equates “economic development” and the “right to work.” Particularly for capital-intensive operations, in which long-term security of expensive plants and equipment is a serious concern, the political conservatism and stability of the South give it an edge over alternative locations in the Third World. Manufacturers of chemicals, machinery, rubber and other products have all constructed plants in the South. Location of the Saturn automobile plant in rural Tennessee is only a recent and relatively well-publicized example of this larger trend, which has generated considerable regional rivalry, especially during periods of recession in the North. These so-called “emerging” or “non-traditional” industries bring opportunities for some of the highest wages paid to southern workers. But for women, they bring very little: employers in these industries rarely turn to women for their production work force, which is over seventy percent male.

The growth industries in which southern working class women find employment are primarily in the ubiquitous sectors of services and retail trade. The more fortunate land a relatively secure job with the government, which in the postwar era has been an important source of service sector expansion and increased job opportunities for women. Nearly one-fourth of all employed women in the South now work for the government; among black women, public employment is even more significant, accounting for nearly one-third of all jobs. In much of the service sector, however, jobs for women may be plentiful but genuine opportunities are few. Pay in the lower ranks of service employment rarely matches even the $5 an hour that women received in manufacturing. In rural areas where tourism has generated a boom in shops, motels and restaurants, earning a living wage is yet more difficult. Jobs for women in tourist-dependent businesses are frequently seasonal, the hours are often part-time, and the wages are almost invariably low.

Most southern women will no doubt survive the present economic crisis, as they have done for generations back. That does not diminish the injustice of their situation, however. There is a shameful gap between the economic contributions of southern working class women and the economic resources that they actually control. The southern economy has long been dependent on the labor of women. Black women were essential to southern agriculture, white women were central to southern industrialization; and now, women of all races are primary workers in the key growth sector of the economy–services. Moreover, as the unpaid laborers in families and households, women have long maintained the southern work force, and made possible survival in a regional economy premised on subsistence-level wages. Women’s poverty is no indication of their contribution to the southern economy; indeed, it is a terrible indictment of the southern economy. Working class women must share in the benefits of southern growth and prosperity. Justice decrees it, equity requires it and, increasingly, southern women demand it.

Barbara Ellen Smith is director of research and education of the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, Lexington, Kentucky. Her essay is the introduction to Picking Up the Pieces, a new booklet by the Highlander Research and Education Center, in which thirty women from ten communities throughout the South talk about their lives–their growth as community leaders, their struggles for integrity and economic survival. Picking Up the Pieces is $5 per copy plus $1 postage from Highlander Center, Route 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820.

Unseen Partners in the Economy

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 4-6

Women have long been “unseen partners” in agricultural production. They have been partners in the sense that their field labor in direct production and their household labor in maintaining the farm labor force have been essential components of U.S. agriculture for centuries. As slaves, black women worked in the fields and houses of the plantation system-picking cotton, stripping tobacco, preparing food for others. Low-income white women worked beside their husbands and children in the fields of family farms, or as tenants or sharecroppers on land owned by others. Wealthier white women functioned as managers and supervisors of the domestic economy of plantations. And yet, all of these women have been “unseen,” invisible, in the sense that their labor, their productive role, has gone largely unrecognized in popular images of the “American farmer” and in scholarly studies of our agricultural system.

For the last century, women have also contributed essential income to the farm economy through their off-farm labor. Black women, for example, long worked as domestic servants in the households of the more well-to-do. As recently as 1960, forty-five percent of all employed black women in the South worked as domestics. Their wages were meager (domestic service is the lowest paying occupation in the U.S.) but essential to farm families chronically strapped for cash.

Farm women, both black and white, have also worked for wages in agricultural processing-whether in canneries, poultry or tobacco plants. Women and, originally, children, predominated in the labor force of the South’s most important manufacturing industry, textiles. In all of these activities, farm women have generated cash income and in occasional cases, health insurance and retirement benefits, which have been critical to their families’ economic survival.

Beyond noting the broad trends of impoverishment and unemployment, it is difficult to gauge the specific effects of the present agricultural crisis on farm women per se. It is generally true in our society that the survival skills with which families weather impoverishment or periods of reduced income are vested primarily in women. It is women who end up patching or making clothes instead of buying them, stretching the food supply to make two meals instead of one, or treating a sick child with home remedies instead of an expensive trip to the doctor. In other words, women tend to intensify their domestic labor during periods of economic hardship, substituting their own hard work for the goods and services that their families can no longer afford to buy. One may surmise that this is happening in many farm families today.

It is also clear that women are increasing their wage-earning labor by seeking employment off the farm. Today, almost half of all farm women in the U.S. are in the paid labor force, as compared to only one-fourth in 1960. Like rural women throughout the South, however, farm women who are looking for jobs these days find few that pay a living wage. The economic crisis in agriculture has coincided with a drastic employment decline in many other traditional Southern industries.

For rural women, who have long been the backbone of the labor force in some of the South’s key manufacturing industries, this loss of jobs has been devastating. Women’s unemployment rates in many Southern states are well above those of men. For black women, unemployment in the fifteen to twenty-five percent range has become standard. The unemployment rate for Southern farm women has been double that of men.

Women of course have found employment in newer non-

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manufacturing sectors of the economy. In the rural South, as in other areas of the nation, the service sector is a key source of new jobs and a major employer of women. In the service industries of the rural South, women make up over forty percent of the labor force. For those with professional training in the traditionally female fields of nursing and teaching, the expansion of educational and health services (which account for a large portion of this sector) has brought increased job opportunities.

Women without professional training, however, tend to end up in the bottom ranks of the service sector, where wages are low, benefits few, and opportunities for advancement scarce. Cooks, maids, cashiers, secretaries, waitresses, nurses aides-these are the occupations of most women in the rural South today. Women displaced even from those industries traditionally considered low-wage are hard pressed to find a service job that matches their former wages. The average wage for workers in restaurants and bars, for example, is about two dollars per hour below that in the textile industry.

Crisis on the Farm

This “double whammy”-the farm crisis coupled with the loss of traditional off-farm jobs affects rural women in ways beyond unemployment statistics and wage rates.

Economic hardship also reaches into the heart of family life in the form of suicide, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and marital breakup. It is difficult to document the extent of these problems among Southern farm families not only because the compilation of data lags behind the problem, but also because events like the breakdown of a marriage may lead one or both partners off the farm altogether. For example, the low percentage of female-headed families in the farm population may be in part because such women don’t remain on the farm.

A recent study of homeless people in Charleston, the West Virginia state capital, is suggestive. Contrary to popular impressions, the research found that the single largest portion of homeless people were not the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, petty criminals, or alcoholics. They were rural people who had been left destitute by economic decline, and who had migrated to the city on a well-worn path called “in search of opportunity.” As part of the growing homeless population of Charleston, most had not found it.

The overall point is that women’s labor has been essential to the rural Southern economy for centuries; as a result, women are deeply affected by present trends in that economy. This occurs not only indirectly through their husbands’ changing economic fortunes, but also directly through their own experiences in the labor market and household. Rural women are intensifying their domestic, household labor at the same time they are increasing their wage-earning labor outside the home. Simultaneously, they are struggling to deal with the destructive effects of economic crisis on their families.

Prospects for the Years Ahead

So, what of the future? What forces are shaping the future for rural women? Specifically, how is public policy shaping their future? First, the obvious must be stated because it is so important: the economic hardship facing rural people, especially women, is being compounded by drastic cutbacks in programs that once cushioned the impact of such hardship. This has occurred not only with transfer payments and income support programs like AFDC and food stamps, but also with programs that helped people participate more fully and fruitfully in the wage economy-retraining programs for displaced workers, job skills development for young people, etc.

Since 1980, funding for all federal employment and training programs has declined by sixty-five percent. These cutbacks have coincided with a policy of actively undercutting affirmative action in both employment and education. Increasingly, women and minorities are neither trained for nor granted access to higher paying jobs. These policies seem so obviously harmful and irrational, given present unemployment and poverty rates in precisely these groups, that they require no further comment.

Other greatly needed programs have never seen the light of day. For example, the need for high quality, locally controlled day care, especially in rural areas, is so urgent it

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can scarcely be overestimated. We are long past the time when rural women, including farm women, stay home to tend house and children while rural men go off to the fields or the paid labor force. Indeed, for many rural families, particularly black families, a non-wage-earning wife and mother is a luxury they could never afford. And yet, the fact that a majority of mothers-those in whom primary responsibility for child-rearing traditionally has been vested-now spend at least eight hours each day working in the paid labor force simply has not been absorbed on the social policy agenda. As a result, many lower-income women face a heartbreaking choice between providing direct care for their children, or leaving them inadequately tended while they work to put food on the table.

The irony in this neglect is that child care represents an excellent target for local economic development. Low-interest loans and technical assistance for the development of locally controlled day care centers, coupled with child care subsidies for low-income working mothers, could promote long-term development by directly offering employment to child care workers, providing a service that would enable women to take advantage of education and training programs. Development can also be enhanced by offering enrichment programs to pre-schoolers and after-school programs to older children.

The Price of Economic Progress

Having catalogued some of the activities that governments are not undertaking, what are they doing? One of the most important economic development strategies currently being pursued by state governments across the South is the promotion of tourism. This is important not only in the sense that tourism is growing rapidly in certain areas, but also in the sense that this industry has a deep effect on rural communities where it takes hold.

The Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition is presently working with women in four Southern states who face the growth of tourism in their rural communities. Unfortunately, the stories they tell are not full of promise and hope, but of anxiety and fear. Along the coast of South Carolina, for example, women from predominantly black, low-income island communities are witnessing the destruction of their traditional means of survival: agriculture and fishing. Their story is typical.

Escalating property taxes and land values are forcing indigenous residents to give up their most important resource. Scarcely a week goes by without news of another resident having sold his or her land, often because of inability to pay the rising property taxes. As “prime waterfront” property increasingly changes hands, the indigenous residents find their access to traditional fishing areas closed by new landowners who forbid trespassing. As a result these trends, the indigenous community is rapidly being destroyed.

What is positive about this situation is the fact that people are organizing to challenge these trends. The low-income rural women with whom we’ve been working do not oppose tourism outright, but they understandably do not want it to destroy their own resources-their land, their culture, their community. They are attempting to pull their communities together around a common vision of economic development that preserves their integrity as a community and protects their control over valuable resources, especially land.

If there is hope for the future of the rural South, it lies with women and men in community organizations like these. The South not only has the highest poverty rate in the United States, it also has the most unequal distribution of income. The problem is not simply one of disparity between the South and the rest of the United States, or between the rural and urban South, but within the South. It is between those who have a great deal and those who have almost nothing. It is unrealistic to expect government at any level to take on this fundamental inequality in a consistent, long-term fashion. Poverty will be reduced in the rural South in the same manner that denial of voting rights was reduced. It will come about when those who are rural and poor organize and declare “No More.” Those who wish to serve the rural poor would do well to listen to the voices and support the efforts of those who are attempting to organize their communities to shape their own future-and particularly to the voices of rural women, who have been unheard and unseen for too long.

Barbara Ellen Smith is a researcher with the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, Lexington, Kentucky.

Barbara Ellen Smith’s essay is an edited version of a talk presented to the 1986 Professional Agricultural Workers Conference held at Tuskegee University. A collection of the papers of the Conference is available from Dr. Thomas T. Williams, Director, Human Resources Development Center, P.O. Box 681, Tuskegee, Alabama 36088.

Rural Poverty and Rural Development

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 13, No. 2, 1991, pp. 14-17

I belong to a generation that never experienced the frightening, pervasive poverty of the Great Depression. I grew up in an urban area believing that poverty was a problem of urban areas, primarily central cities, and that rural poverty was a problem of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

I learned a long time ago that my perceptions were naive and ill-informed. but I also learned that many of the dominant ideas about poverty–ideas that have framed the debate over poverty and guided public policy toward it–are also ill-conceived.

One popular idea holds that poverty in rural areas is a consequence of those areas’ isolation from the mainstream economy and culture. The persistence of poverty in rural areas confirms their backwardness, their resistance to integration with the mainstream, If you hold this point of view and are in a position to influence public policy, then you attempt to increase access to rural areas; you develop the rural infrastructure, promote the ties between rural and urban areas, and above all build roads. You may also create “growth centers” that you hope will function as magnets for investment and stimuli for rural development Those of you who are familiar with the policies of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) will recognize these activities as the cornerstone of ARC’s “bricks and mortar” approach to development.

A second view holds that rural people are poor primarily because they have too little money and lack access to necessary services such as health care, education, vocational training, and so forth. If you adopt this view, then you try to increase the availability, affordability and accessibility of services in rural areas. You subsidize rural clinics and public schools. To the extent that there was grassroots opposition to ARC development policy, it centered on the need to promote such services rather than build more roads.

A third approach to rural poverty that literally arrived with the Mayflower and the Protestant ethic of the early pilgrims, but has enjoyed renewed appeal lately, holds that poverty is ultimately the fault of the individual who is poor. Poor people, urban and rural, live in a culture of poverty, a cycle of poverty, that involves a suspiciously irregular attachment to the labor force, a weak work ethic, too many children, and so forth. This view undergirds the punitive and coercive initiatives in welfare policy that we have seen of late.

These first two approaches–“bricks and mortar” development and increasing access to services–have both bad beneficial consequences in rural areas. Where implemented, they have relieved some of the burdens of

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living in rural poverty and in some cases have allowed individuals to leave the ranks of the poor.

However, I am convinced that if we limit our analysis and our public policy to these choices, we will never eliminate or consistently reduce poverty in rural areas. The fundamental problem with all of these approaches is that they view poverty as the problem of areas and individuals who are outside of the mainstream of middleclass America, and who require a special set of anti- poverty policies tailored to their needs.

Poverty is not a problem of areas isolated or left behind by the mainstream economy; poverty is inherent in an economy where there is constant, downward pressure on the wages and standard of living of poor and working class people. Poverty is not just something happening to “those people” over there–rural areas or central cities. In an era of such great economic uncertainty, when there is increasingly extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth, a declining standard of living, a disintegration in public services of all sorts, poverty hangs as a dreadful potential over us all. Except for those with substantial personal or family wealth (which is a small proportion even of the white population), we are all one disabling illness away from poverty. Endemic poverty cannot be solved by a set of programs (food stamps, AFDC, and other “welfare” programs) isolated from the meat and potatoes of economic policy, tax policy, and development policy. As long as we isolate the problem of poverty and anti-poverty policies from the mainstream economy and economic policy, we will never get at the fundamental relations of power that are at the root of poverty.

Poverty systematically created

In the United States, we sometimes talk about poverty as if it just “happens” to individuals. Some “escape” it, others “fall into” it who knows why? Poverty does not just “happen”; poverty has been systematically created.

Nowhere is this more clear or more true than in the rural South where poverty has been systematically created by individuals who have enriched themselves by the labor and impoverishment of others. Poverty has been sustained and nourished by those who have an interest in its perpetuation.

Let us not forget, as we analyze and search for solutions to the problem of rural poverty, that the economy of the rural South was built on the backs of those who were impoverished in the most extreme, ultimate sense, legally and economically. Slavery was the chief labor system in the rural South for three centuries, and it has only been in the last twenty-five years that some of the most offensive aspects of its legacy have been formally and legally if not actually abolished. Slavery set the floor, the standard for the remuneration of workers and small farmers in the South. It is small wonder that a race-based system of no wages should be replaced by a race-based system of low wages, in which black workers and white workers, male workers and female workers, have been assigned different jobs, sometimes to different workplaces, to the division, the detriment, and the impoverishment of all.

For the last hundred years, economic boosters and industrial recruiters have advertised the South’s attractions to business: its natural resources, cheap electricity, and above all, its cheap labor. Textile manufacturers were among the first to heed this call. They built factories that made the rural South the most industrialized rural region of the U.S. but they also paid their workers–predominantly white women and children–such low wages that they ensured the continued impoverishment of rural Southerners. Heeding the racial code of the time, these early industrialists hired almost no blacks in their mills. ‘This helped to ensure that rural blacks would have no alternative to tenancy and sharecropping, and thus continue to provide cheap labor for white planters. The details of these historical arrangements are not the important point. The point is that for these early architects of the “New South,” poverty and racism were not the chief problems of the region–poverty and racism were the chief assets.

Up until the mid-1980s, a succession of business leaders and economic developers have continued to feature the poverty, powerlessness and racial division of its workers as the rural South’s chief attractions. “Cheap labor, docile labor, no unions, no strikes”–these are the watchwords. And, within the limits of their view of the world, this strategy worked. Manufacturers in search of low wages streamed into the region, making the rural South the branch plant capital of the United States.

In the last five to ten years, however, all has begun to change. Unfortunately, this is not because the South’s business and political leaders have undergone a sudden moral awakening. Rater, economic development policies have begun to move away from industrial recruitment because the strategy no longer works. In an era of global mobility, the labor-intensive manufacturing industries that once sought the rural South’s cheap labor are precisely those industries most likely to relocate overseas, where they can pay workers one-tenth of what they pay rural Southerners.

Thus, community after community in the rural South has been abandoned by corporate employers that were once the life-blood of the local economy. This disinvestment has left in its wake abandoned factories, unem-

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ployed workers, intensified poverty, and increased out-migration of the population, especially the young. I do not need to chronicle the hardship; you see it every day. What I would like to emphasize, though, is the opportunity that this hardship presents.

A ‘free space’ for economic debate

The breakdown in the economic order of the rural South has created a “free space,” an open space in which fundamental questions about the economy are now open for debate. Probably not since the Great Depression has this happened on such a scale. Those who want to stay in the rural areas they consider home are asking: What kinds of jobs do we want to try to create in our community? How can we do that? Who should make decisions about the future of our community? How–beyond jobs–do we want to develop our community?

These questions are open for debate because the individuals and institutions that once defined and ran the local economy are disappearing. As the old order breaks down, the paternalism and powerlessness that once held poor and working-class people in a dependent relationship with local economic elites are also breaking down. Most political officials, including state and local development authorities, have been completely unable to offer new, meaningful development strategies for rural communities. Some continue to pursue industrial recruitment; other pursue tourism, if the area is scenic; if not, they advise development of hazardous waste dumps. There is a void in vision, a void in leadership about how to transform the rural South into a better place where all can make a decent living.

The most hopeful and creative initiatives in rural development today are coming from the grassroots, often from people who were victims of development in the past People in communities across the rural South, from southwest Virginia to coastal Louisiana, have begun to come together locally in new ways to exert greater control over their economic future. In Ivanhoe, Virginia, for example, a series of plant closings left people without jobs, without income, without their young people. Poor and working-class citizens realized that if anything was going to be done to reverse the situation, they would have to do it themselves. They went to the county industrial commission and were rebuffed. They tried the traditional strategy of recruiting a factory and failed. Finally, they decided to develop their own vision of development They decided that a small-scale tourist industry under community control would be most desirable and feasible. They are now fighting with the county commission over access to land on which to develop this industry, so they have not yet accomplished what they set out to do. However, in the process of developing their own vision of development they have developed leadership, deepened their political savvy and understanding, built a community organization, and above all begun to view the economy and economic development not as things that someone else does to them, but as processes that they can initiate and control.

There are many examples of community-based development. MACE in Mississippi and the Southern Mutual Help Association in Louisiana have targeted low-income housing as a priority and put together creative initiatives combining private capital, community-based done, volunteers, and federal dollars to build or upgrade housing for poor people. Other groups have focused on access to capital for those traditionally shut out of the credit system–be they black, female, or poor.

All of these approaches to development can be grouped together as “self help” models. They emphasize development from within, reliance on local talent, energy, organizations, and capital.

Others have targeted policies and practices in the mainstream economy and used the political process to exert control over those they consider most objectionable. For example, groups have sought legislation to soften the impact of plant closings, improve retraining for displaced workers, and extend pro-rated benefits to part-time and temporary workers. Although such efforts are often reactive, rather than proactive, they address economic trends that affect millions of poor and working class people.

Community-based approaches are best

The best–meaning durable, visionary, and potentially far-reaching–of these diverse approaches to development have common elements. First, they seek to build broad coalitions that reach across the divides of race, class and gender. They include church groups, civil rights groups, women’s organizations, labor unions, and whoever else is interested in and supportive of the agenda of community-oriented development.

Second, they seek to build or re-build community in all its aspects. Thus the group in Ivanhoe conducted an extensive oral history project that documented the history of their community and resulted in the publication of two books that are a source of great pride. Most recently, they have started a community radio station. The priority is community development, not individual advancement.

Third, these groups support and recognize the leadership of those who have no traditionally been in positions of power, be they black, female, poor, or all three. Associated with this promotion of non-traditional leadership is a reliance on local talent and resources, be it the skills

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of local carpenters, the capital of local banks, or the natural resources of local timber, water, or scenic beauty.

Finally, these efforts reach beyond traditional definitions of economic development. Development is not just jobs; development is childcare, recreation facilities, housing, and quality education. This redefinition involves not only the substance of development but also the process and, above all, the question of who controls the process. All of these efforts reject the notion that development should be done to or for the rural South, and argue instead that development should be done by rural Southerners for their communities. In other words, development should be democratic.

This central idea that development must be democratic is the most significant aspect of these new community-based initiatives. It makes them visionary and potentially transformative, yet at the same time keeps them culturally rooted and appropriate, given the traditions and values of our county.

Fundamental and strategic questions

As hopeful and inspiring as many of these efforts are, they will remain isolated and marginal unless we begin to tackle at least two fundamental strategic questions. First is a group of questions concerning the relationship between economic development and the political process. We face a situation in this county where “our” government, especially at the federal level, exercises considerable control over certain aspects of the economy through. for example, taxation, the Federal Reserve system, and the federal budget Yet the decisions most directly affecting our rural economies at the local level–for example, the decision to invest or disinvest in a certain plant in rural Mississippi–are all in private hands. How can we utilize the political process to enforce greater accountability by private capital to our local communities? How can local political institutions–county commissions, local development authorities, and municipal governments–be used to the fullest extent to influence investment and disinvestment decisions, and the larger community development process? What are the limits and potential for realizing a new vision of community development through the political process?

Looking critically at these questions will lead us to create new political tools, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, that increase the accountability of capital to local communities and that expand the potential for genuinely democratic development I think we will also begin to look more broadly and inclusively and build new coalitions that join people across the boundaries of towns and counties and thereby overcome the fragmented and competitive characteristics of traditional economic development In such a direction lies the political power necessary to make development happen and make it happen democratically. Ultimately, I think we will grapple with the need to align federal economic policy with our local development visions. Over the long run, we cannot successfully promote investment and a decent standard of living in the Delta or the coalfields or anywhere else in the rural South when the federal government promotes capital mobility out of the region (through, for example, the recent “fast track” negotiations with Mexico) and purposefully undermines the wages and economic power of workers.

This leads to the ultimate practical question that all development efforts face: access to capital. Rural poor people obviously do not control, nor do they have access to, capital. Our efforts are doomed to marginality until we figure out how to leverage significant private-sector funds or develop the political power to leverage significant public-sector funds for rural development. As awesome as this task may seem, the more difficult and enduring question involves who will control the allocation of such funds. We do not need to create another Appalachian Regional Commission with a fat budget for the rural South. We do not need to leverage federal monies for porkbarrel projects controlled by unaccountable political machines. As we expand our vision and strategy, we need to hold fast to the empowering process that necessity currently dictates we are doing development for our communities. This means, I think, that we need to build broadly participatory community organizations that, precisely because of their solid and broad social base (and not because of shrewd grant-seekers), are capable of leveraging funds for development and ensuring that those funds are spent where they are most needed. Only as development becomes genuinely democratic and participatory can it improve the lives of those who have been so exploited and impoverished by development in the past.

Barbara Ellen Smith’s comment were made in Atlanta during the Southern Regional Council’s annual meeting last November

Rethinking Race and Poverty in the Global South

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 3-4

The borders of the South are collapsing. The forces of globalization are reconfiguring demographics, workplaces, and-not just in Miami or Atlanta, but in Tunica, Mississippi; Big Stone Gap, Tennessee; and Kannapolis, North Carolina.

Among the most significant of these changes regards race: increasingly, we no longer confront a singular divide between Black and white, but a multivalent complex of “new” and “old” races. People from diverse nations and cultures are relocating to the South; those from Spanish-speaking countries find themselves newly identified as “Latino,” and are the fastest growing minority in many areas. Others from the many nationalities and ethnicities of Asia further diversify the racial demographics of some states, becoming “Asian American.”

This is not to suggest that the historic legacy of African-American exploitation and poverty is no longer significant; quite the opposite. The new racial configurations could undermine Black voting strength and the fragile political coalitions that have been built in some areas. They threaten to inflame overt racial antagonism among white Southerners as well as Black, who see their neighborhoods and workplaces increasingly populated with new racial groups, especially Latinos. They raise difficult political questions about who should be eligible for minority set-aside programs, affirmative action, and other race-specific remedies that were designed to address African-American disfranchisement and dispossession.

In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, where Black political power is recent and bitterly won, the African-American mayor met several months ago with a newly formed group of Latino business leaders. They sought access to the minority set-aside program for municipal contracts. Mayor W.W. Herenton was, to say the least, not receptive to their proposal.

Globalization of the South also carries profound implications for the origins and racial character of poverty. For more than three centuries, the South’s political economy has depended on the racialized exploitation of Black labor – whether as slaves, sharecroppers, or workers limited to bottom-rung jobs in the system of Jim Crow. One of the most perverse, cruel ironies of this post-Jim Crow, post-industrial era is the elimination of that longstanding (although racially subordinated) incorporation of working-class African Americans in the South’s economy. Now we see the deracination of working-class Black Southerners from any legitimate and secure economic role at all. Since 1950, the proportion of African-American men who are not in the labor force has risen by more than 50 percent in the South. Increasingly, the problem is not the discrimination of a rigid job ladder that relegates Black workers to the bottom rungs, but the operation of a global economy that pushes Black workers off the ladder altogether.

The far-reaching implications of globalization challenge our most basic concepts and assumptions about race and poverty. They require us to rethink even the words we use to discuss these twin issues.

“Race,” for example, has acquired a fixity that these global forces undermine. Not only do we tend to think of race as referring primarily to Black and white, we also think of it as a self-evident characteristic that we all possess in one form or another. But the processes whereby new races are at this very moment being created remind us that race is not inborn. “Native Americans” from the Yucatan do not define themselves as Latino or Hispanic – but they ironically become so through the processes of racialization at work in the United States. Their experiences, and those of the many other immigrant groups new to the South, reveal that race is not fixed and obvious, a product of birth, but something we make and re-make every day.

These processes of racialization and diversification also remind us that white is just as much a racial category as Black or brown. To be white is not to be merely “normal;” it is to be racially privileged. Being white can include unemployment, homelessness, sex discrimination for white women, and a host of other systematic disadvantages; on the matter of skin color, however, it involves unearned power and privilege. As long as we conceptualize race as an unfortunate label that applies only to African Americans, or even to diverse people of color, we fail to recognize it as a dynamic social relationship in which all are implicated.

Finally, these reconfigurations make it clear that race does not create fixed and monolithic groups. Even as globalization dispossesses working-class Southerners of all races, the new international division of labor rewards those knowledgeable workers who have the requisite education and skills. As a result, the gulf of class widens within racial groups.

Gender also is emerging as a more recognized distinction. The problems and opportunities facing women and men of the same race are not the same. Black women are not being thrown into prison at nearly the rates of Black

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men; conversely, Black men are not stigmatized as lazy welfare queens. Among Latinos, immigration appears to be heaviest among adult males, who are separated from their families-a pattern with many social implications for the Southern communities where they live. The overall point is that complex intra- as well as inter-racial dynamics and divisions are increasingly evident.

Globalization also requires rethinking our understanding of poverty in the South. Despite the momentous forces at work redistributing economic opportunity and disadvantage all over the world, our thinking about poverty is small, even petty-trapped in a language of pathology and an associated politics of blame. We have so individualized and moralized poverty that the fundamental issue-lack of economic power and resources-has been eliminated from the national debate.

We have arrived at the bizarre point where single motherhood has become both a synonym for poverty and an emblem of moral deficiency. This is not to deny the obvious arithmetic: two wage-earners will tend to make more than one. The point is that marital status and other morally-loaded individual attributes are used to characterize the poor as a whole, distinguishing them from upright, tax-paying citizens (and the truly rich who, as we all know, work very hard, always pay their taxes and never sleep around). Through this topsy-turvy logic, marital status has come to function as a stand-in for economic, or class status.

The issue is not moral inequality, however, but economic inequality. Indeed, we might do well to stop using the term “poverty” altogether, for the concept has been so appropriated by a right-wing definition of the issue. Poverty is a descriptive term that has come to connote an individual misfortune or deficiency that has nothing to do with those who are better off. But people are poor only in relation to those who have greater wealth; indeed, in some cases, people are poor because other people have great wealth. We should perhaps speak instead of economic inequality or, in some instances, class inequality.

When we conceptualize the issue as economic inequality, we begin moving toward an analysis of social relationships and root causes, rather than a description of misfortunes for which the poor are routinely blamed. We move the level of analysis away from individual characteristics, toward regional economic forces that are increasingly linked with those of the globe. How else are we to understand the presence of Somali refugees in the low-wage work force of rural Mississippi’s casinos? Or the new forms of disfranchisement and dispossession experienced by Mexican immigrants who work in North Carolina’s poultry plants under a cloud of suspicion and insecurity regarding their legal status?

Naming the problem as economic inequality also moves us away from an exclusive political focus on the ensemble of anti-poverty programs that are a fading legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. As long as our political energy and analysis concentrate on the terrain of social welfare, we risk missing the larger landscape of economic policy where much of the real action takes place. Defining the issue as economic inequality makes it clear that we need to address free trade, monetary policy, the tax structure, minimum wage – all the meat and potatoes of national and international economic policy.

Globalization is transforming the nature of race and poverty-indeed, the very character of the South itself. That does not mean that we can no longer speak of the South, for our distinctive past ensures that we will be dealing with the legacies of Southernness for some time to come. However, we are in the throes of momentous flux and instability. Global change raises troubling new questions, but it also signals new possibilities for intervention. Immigration and diversification open up the fixity of the Black-white divide, creating new potential for coalition-building. Growing economic inequality suggests new possibilities for class-based movements. A global future is upon us. What will we make of it?

Barbara Ellen Smith is director of the Memphis Center on Women at the University of Memphis.