Following this came Pete Daniel in Dispossession in which strives to explain the significant but relatively unknown part of the civil rights movement involving the struggles against institutional discrimination that targeted black farmers in the South and their aptitude to serve as a window into the association between race and government in modern American history. The number of black farmers in the South grew swiftly in the years following the Civil War.
After the both world wars and the Great Depression, the numbers of farms in general decreased, but not proportionately along the ethnic groups of farmers. What Daniel exposes is the appearance between 1940 and 1964 of a considerably unequal ratio of white-owned to black-owned farms that came around as numerous Americans were led to believe that federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) were working vigorously to secure equal access
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Central to his thesis are the findings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who began a campaign in the spring of 1964 that focused exclusively on USDA discrimination. In chapter 2, titled “Evidence,” Daniel explains how the commission uncovered vast inequities between white and black farmers with regard to their access not only to government programs but also to agents and seats on government oversight committees. Situating his argument in the larger historiography on the civil rights movement, Daniel explains that there was more activism occurring in the Deep South during the mid-1960s than the voter registration drives often associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) “Freedom Summer.” Primarily, this involved educating blacks about their eligibility for federal programs, as well as assistance with navigating the intentionally long and difficult forms that one had to complete in order to