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Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format. Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew, Chapter six.
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Matt Simmons
Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Marshall Poe
Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Matt Simmons
So this is Matt Simmons with the American South Channel of the New Books Network. Today I am talking with Diane T. Feldman about her book Borrowed Land, Stolen labor and the Holy Spirit, the struggle for power and equality in Holmes County, Mississippi. So first of all, Diane, thank you for meeting with me today.
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Diane T. Feldman
Hey, thanks for having me.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah, So I really enjoyed reading your book. We're going to do what we usually do and so just tell me a little bit about the origins of this project and then maybe after that give a brief overview of the work and kind of what it entails.
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Diane T. Feldman
Great. I have a long standing interest since I was about 11 years old, which is 60 plus years ago in the Mississippi Civil Rights movement, which to it's. The Mississippi Civil rights movement was very distinctive in that it was where SNCC was most active, Mississippi and Alabama. And was very much of a grassroots organizing effort rather than a legal effort or a initially church driven effort. And I first heard about all of this when I was 11 and which was the Summer of Freedom Summer and followed it ever since. When I retired in 2018, I wanted to learn even more and I knew about Holmes county and the role there of African American farmers and how important they were in organizing in the Delta. So I wanted to learn more about that. The Holmes county civil rights movement has been well covered. It's discussed in local people. The John Dittmer book, which I think is one of the very best books written about the Mississippi civil rights movement. There are other books written about Holmes County. There's a woman who would there in the later part of the civil rights movement who wrote a book expressly about Holmes County. That's Sue Sojourner Lorenzi, Thunder of Freedom, I think it is. So all of that was already out there and it is also covered in my own book because it is where it all started. But I wanted to know why were there so many African American farmers in Holmes County? How did they become so active in the civil rights movement? The Milestone co op, which was technically formed in 1940s by the Federal Farm Security Administration of the FDR administration, is critical in all of the civil rights stories. And it still exists. And I wanted to know more about that so that there was. I wanted to get the continuities. And as I've said, I sort of got in touch with my inner 2 year old, you know, one of those annoying kids that asks why to everything? And by asking why to everything it became a book. The book actually starts with the formation of the land, which is obviously a critical through line. And the Indians and their relationship to the land, the land speculators who are in many ways responsible for the Mississippi Delta having large plantations rather than small farms. And then obviously once they had large plantations, the importation of enslaved people from all over, which is distinctive in Mississippi and Alabama, that the enslaved people here came from all over Africa because they came from the French colonies, up from New Orleans and the British colonies, down from Virginia and the Carolinas. Some had been here for generations. While it wasn't legal, some did come direct from Africa and were all brought to very hard labor in the Mississippi Delta. So it goes through that story as well, the Civil War and Reconstruction and then forward from that, which is where the African American land ownership story really begins.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah, I really appreciated the. The organization of your book being chronological like that, because there's always this debate Right. Among writers, is it going to be thematic, is it going to be chronological, is it going to be kind of a blending of both? And you certainly do some of the blending, but the chronological aspect makes it really easy to kind of follow along with. And the way you balance out kind of Holmes county with what's happening at the state level and the national level, I think you do that really well. And I appreciated that you're always kind of pulling us back into Holmes county and kind of the key players there. So I thought that was really great, too.
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Diane T. Feldman
It actually started more of a blend of the thematic and the chronological. And I had one of my reviewers in my first round at University Press did a wonderful job giving me advice on how to structure it. So I think it's a him. I don't actually know, but I'm pretty sure it's a him. I thank him for that.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah, there's always so many people behind a book. Right. And you listed them in the acknowledgments, which was great and appropriate. But, yeah, you always get the person with the title and then everyone kind of behind pulling along with them and supporting them, which I think is great. It's always a collaborative thing. So we're going to jump ahead a little bit because your book is great. There's so much to cover. We just can't cover it in the time that we have. So we're going to kind of jump ahead a little bit to chapter three, A New century, kind of the turn of the century, starting the 1900s through the 1950s. So in this chapter, you talk a little bit more about forced labor, violence, strand, minority rule. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how African Americans in Holmes county are responding to those constraints, the rise of Jim Crow, these restrictions that are being placed upon them. So what is the reaction? Like, what do they do to respond to that?
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Diane T. Feldman
This was. This chapter, Chapter three was really the one that I learned the most from because I had this image of just simply oppressed people. I referenced Douglas Blackmun's term, the neo slavery, who refer to the Jim Crow period. And it was people lost economic control of their lives as they were working as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Tenant farmers, of course, rent the land from the plantation owner and then they obviously using what they farm to pay the rent. Sharecroppers don't own any land. They are there at the behest, I guess, of the plantation owner, and they farm the land and for a share of the crop from which the plantation owner deducts their living expenses for the prior year. And it's his determination what those expenses are. And they generally buy from his store. And so it's a very profitable operation for the plantation owner, but a one in which the sharecropper themselves has very little independence. So, you know, once that system began and most of the African American people in Holmes county were sharecroppers, the neo slavery term becomes appropriate because they don't have economic control. They have control over their personal lives, but not really over their economic lives at all. But what I discovered and hadn't fully recognized or hadn't really recognized at all before the book was everything that black people there, and frankly, throughout the south, and certainly throughout the Mississippi Delta, did for themselves, it was very much a time of strengthening cooperation and community to help each other out. That was true in church. That was also true in their economic lives. And there are a number of organizations that become absolutely seminal that were formed during that period, and they were not. Yes, they were victimized, but more than the victimization, they organized themselves. This is at this point, 60 years before what we think of as the civil rights movement. But they were organizing already and organizing themselves for their own protection and economic lives.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah, I mean, that is a common misconception, right, that before civil rights, there isn't pushback, there isn't resistance. There aren't things happening within the African American community to push back against these constraints. And really, there are a lot of things happening. They're not always necessarily well documented in the historical record like they should be, or even in kind of the popular perception of those. Those periods of time. But I think you're right. Like, there are definitely things happening. One of those things that's happening is the Church of God in Christ, which I really appreciate you introducing me to this, to this church, because I hadn't heard of it before, and I'm fairly familiar with different denominations, even within kind of that Pentecostalism strain of Christianity. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the origins of this church. So one of these organizations, again, that's being founded kind of in response to a lot of what's going on. So the CEO, gic, and then kind of its role in the black community during Jim Crow. And then it would probably be helpful to talk a little bit too about the holiness movement that it's a part of. And then kind of sanctification, what that means. You've already defined tenant farming and sharecropping. I appreciate that because people don't always know what those are and the difference between the two. So a little bit maybe of a definition holiness movement sanctification, and then how that Church of God in Christ kind of ties into that.
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Diane T. Feldman
Yeah. And it. It is often referred to as COGIC or per the bishop, I always refer to in the book as the Kojik.
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Matt Simmons
Thank you.
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Diane T. Feldman
Thank you, Church of God in Christ. So we. That you can actually trace the holiness movement back to the 16th century, but we won't do that and we'll just pop up into the 1880s. That religion in Mississippi had changed dramatically. I'll go back a little before that, from the time it became a state, because that was during the period of what's called the Second Great Awakening. And the white people who had originally been Congregationalists or Anglican became part of evangelical religions. Presbyterian, Methodist, and in Mississippi, particularly Baptist. That early change in and of itself in the 1820s at least, was biracial and quite egalitarian in that the belief was. And a lot of this comes from John Wesley. And again, I'll resist going back too far, but that instead of it simply being the case that you are baptized in the beginning of life and need to strive to be free from sin, that there is a process of sanctification. What that means is that you can in fact have a second or rebirth of some sort that allows you to then live your life as Christ would have you live your life. What really changed in the 1880s was the notion that that could be a charismatic experience. The Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches had had varying degrees of institutionalization between the. The 19. In the 1940s and 50s, and all had in some way separated either factions or the whole church from their northern churches of the same denominations around the issues of slavery. Presbyterian. The Presbyterian Presbyterian Church, for example, had been opposed to slavery almost from its inception in the United States. But the Southern Presbyterian churches separated from that and the. The Southern Baptist Church separated fairly completely. And so they had in the meantime, become institutionalized and politically acceptable and part of the structure in the 1880s. There were all of these revivalist preachers who were not part of that. And they were once again preaching an egalitarian notion that anyone could experience the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and become sanctified. And rather than that being a gradual process, it could be a sudden experience of something that happens to you where you experience that indwelling and become sanctified. That grows into the Pentecostal movement in the beginning of the 20th century. And the Church of God in Christ, which was founded in Lexington, which is in Als county, was very much a part of that story. Take a break for a minute and skip to Los Angeles where there was a the Azusa Street Revival. All of the Pentecostal churches in the United States, both black and white, trace their origins to the Azusa Street Revival, which was led by William Seymour, who is African American. And the change there was the importance of the absolute sudden experience of the indwelling of Jesus Christ, which could be, but lots of debates around the theology of this could be, but was not necessarily accompanied by speaking in tongues and glossolalia Seymour, before the Azusa street movement actually came through Jackson, Mississippi and spent some time with the preachers at Mount Helm, which included Charles Harrison Mason, who would found the Church of God in Christ, and Charles Price Jones, who was a very important figure in the holiness movement. Mason then went out to Azusa street and was there at Azusa street for several weeks, did experience the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and did in fact experience the. The speaking in tongues and came back to the church where he was preaching already in Lexington, Mississippi, and started to teach what he learned in Azusa Street. The Church of God in Christ, which now has millions of members worldwide and hundreds of churches, was then founded as a denomination in 1907 in Memphis. Again, it was still biracial. He ordained any number of white ministers. In part, these revivalist preachers didn't have a denomination yet and they could get cut rate railroad tickets if they were official ministers. And so being ordained helped them do that. And in part, in fact, it was genuinely a biracial movement in its beginning up until World War I, really. And the Assemblies of God grew out of that period. But in any case, back to the Church of God in Christ, as I said, hundreds of churches worldwide, millions of members worldwide, and has an enormously important string of events within the civil rights movement.
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Marshall Poe
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Diane T. Feldman
First is simply the notion that anyone can experience the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and become sanctified is an extremely egalitarian notion of it was a very freeing notion for the millions of people who became members of it, particularly in those early years. It was living your life as Christ would have you live. Your life was about service to the poor and service to your community. And so just this theology behind it and behind their concept of sanctification was very much in line with egalitarianism, democracy and social justice, although they didn't use the words democracy and social justice. One of the big events that catapulted the Church of God in Christ Forward was the funeral of Emmett Till. Emmett Till's family, who was originally from Mississippi, I think probably all your listeners are aware that he was a 14 year old child who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose mother insisted on an open casket funeral so that the extraordinary violence that was perpetrated on him was seen around the world. He had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a store, although it's not clear he ever actually did that. And there are lots of books that are written about Emmett Till and that murder. His funeral was at a COGIC church in Chicago. The pastor of that church actually had grown up in the Mississippi Delta, had pastored churches in Lexington, Mississippi and later became the Presiding Bishop of the COGIC Church. The presiding Bishop overseeing the worldwide COGIC Churches. Martin Luther King's speech I'VE been to the mountaintop, which was the day before, the night before he was killed, was at the COGIC Church in Memphis, the main church of the Church of God in Christ. Any number of figures that are important in the civil rights movement began in the Cochick church, including Medgar Evers, Reverend L. Sharpton. It also has an enormous impact on blues music because it incorporated traditions of African religion and worship from the beginning and that included full instrumentation music. BP King was in the Cochick church. Eddie Cotton, who's still a very popular blues singer here in Mississippi, was. His father was a Cochick pastor. So it has an enormous interaction with the civil rights movement and with blues music and the development of African American culture in the South.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah, thank you, that's really helpful. Yeah. And as I was reading that section about the Church of God in Christ and you know, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr. All these other folks you're naming, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, this church has such a kind of deep and profound footprint that most people just are not aware of. Right. So I really appreciate you highlighting that and saying, hey, it's kind of at the center of all these things that are happening, whether it's civil rights or just music, popular music, the impact on.
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Diane T. Feldman
That, they are not a self promotional church. They are a church that is serious about service and sanctification. And so you have to go, you have to go check it out yourself. I do have to say that I, I, I spent a fair amount of time with both Bishop William Dean, who is the bishop for Northern Mississippi, and with Pastor Percy Lewis Washington, who's very interested in history and has written a song about Emmett Till. I was, I found their congregations and them hugely welcoming. Everyone is very clear that they are, while, yes, they are now an African American church, that that happened for historical and external reasons and is not part of their theology. And they're very welcoming.
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Matt Simmons
Excellent. So we're going to move forward a little bit chronologically. So talk a little bit about the Great Depression. A couple of farms that come out of that Providence Farm, Millston Farms, which you already mentioned, a little bit. So maybe talk a little bit more about the impact of the Great Depression on tenant farmers and sharecroppers and then again some of the responses, reactions or even opportunities that are coming out of that struggle during the Great Depression.
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Diane T. Feldman
Right. To do that I need to go to 1920 and of course the crashes in 1929. But during the 1920s, the African American farmers in Holmes county, particularly in other places as well. But Holmes county was actually a center of it. This is the reason why there are so many African American farmers took advantage of the 1916 Federal Loan act, and with some help from the Rosenwald foundation, they, those who already owned more than 100 acres, formed a loan bank and actually made loans. The 1916 Federal Loan act allowed localized banks to finance amortized loans and help them do so. And so, with some seed money from the larger farmers and the Rosenwald foundation, they started to give loan money to sharecroppers to purchase their land. And that was very much of a local cooperative effort. And the reality is that that is a core reason why there are so many today still black farmers in Holmes county, and certainly were in the 1940s. They had cooperative marketing for those who were part of the National Federation of Colored Farmers, where they had a truck to market products directly to Memphis so that they didn't have to go through a middleman in Mississippi and lose money that way. They helped each other out. They shared equipment. And it's really an extraordinary story. And I should note at this point that the National Federation of Color Farmers was headed by a man named James Davis, also Leon Harris. But James Davis became part of the Roosevelt Cabinet. So I needed to have that as a precursor to what happened during the Depression. The National Federation of Collard Farmers stayed very active. And the Depression had an enormously negative consequence, obviously on everybody, particularly on agriculture and particularly on sharecroppers, because when the notion was that to start to build back prices, you would have farmers farm only an allotment of their land. So for cotton prices, for example, which had collapsed, they simply were trying to limit the growth of cotton in order to increase the price of cotton. What the plantation owners did initially was to boot the sharecroppers off their land, boot the. The tenant farmers off their land, and basically farm only that portion that went directly to them for which they weren't compensating sharecroppers or tenant farmers. And there are devastating stories from Holmes county, as there are all over the south, of what happened to the sharecroppers during that period. Those who owned their land at least, were able to feed themselves, and for the most part, did not in Holmes county lose their land. But those that were tenant farmers or sharecroppers, they're just some horrendous stories of people not having enough for food in the winter, the capacity to feed or clothe themselves. How cold. Mississippi's not that cold compared to many other places, but it does get cold here, and it was Bad.
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Matt Simmons
The.
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Diane T. Feldman
There were efforts at pushback, as I said. The National Federation of Collard Farmers continued. The. Those who owned their land tried to feed people. There was also some growth of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union during that period. That was mostly, frankly, in Arkansas, but there were some efforts in Mississippi as well. And it drew attention to the problems of the sharecroppers, which weren't really something that people in the north at that time were aware of. And did end up changing policies in the Roosevelt administration on allotments and looking out for sharecroppers and beginning to help sharecroppers and tenant farmers purchase land.
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Matt Simmons
So the Providence Farm, Mileston Farms. How does that figure into all of these different changes that are happening? People kind of struggling to find a way forward in the Great Depression. People getting evicted or just kind of just having just enough food on the table to kind of make it to the next day. So where do those kind of fit into that picture?
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Diane T. Feldman
Yeah, those are. Those are to some degree independent from each other, but thematically connected. The Milestone co op was in fact technically formed by the Farm Security administration, specifically Region 6. There were efforts to help sharecroppers purchase land. Frankly, disproportionately that help went to white sharecroppers, of whom there were quite a few. And, you know, there was a delicate balance, I think, within the Farm Security Administration on preserving congressional support while helping sharecroppers, which was part of the help they gave. Being disproportionately white, there were a handful of all black cooperative efforts. Milestone was the one that was entirely under Region 6 of the Farm Security Administration. Milestone is about 5 miles by how the Crow Flies from Howard, which was the center of organizing for the National Federation of Colored Farmers. And as I mentioned, one of the leaders of the National Federation of Collared Farmers is in the Roosevelt Cabinet. I have no paper that president proves it, but it seems sort of self evident to me that the reason that Milestone is where it is in Holmes county, as this iconic sort of this is what we should do cooperative effort almost certainly connects to the efforts of the National Federation of Collard Farmers, five miles away in Howard. I will just interject that we, the Migration Heritage foundation, which is a Holmes county foundation, put up a sign just last week in Howard commemorating the National Federation of Colored Farmers. So the Milestone co op was the baby, in essence, of the Region 6 Farm Security Administration. And there's a story about the leadership of that effort that's in the book that's interesting from a number of perspectives is that the man who headed it is an interesting man, not a liberal and yet very dedicated to sharecroppers, including African American sharecroppers owning their own land. So they began it. They also began a school at Mileston, flood control efforts at Mileston, training at Milestone. It was a full community effort to have a co op that would then be turned over entirely to the African American landowners within it. People own their own land, but it is set up as a co op and they share equipment. It's very similar in some ways to what the National Federation of Color farmers did on their own 10, 15 years before milestone was formed. So it became absolutely seminal in the civil rights movement. The leaders of the Milestone co op were also the leaders of the civil rights movement in Holmes County. They had the independence to fight back and they had a tradition of doing so. And they continued to do so. Providence Farm was more of a top down effort and struggled with its top down qualities. It was formed by a number of people who followed Reinhold Nieper and were Christian socialists and wanted to form a biracial co op in the Delta. They had an earlier farm in Bolivar county that failed for a number of reasons, including not knowing enough about the land and making a bad choice in what they purchased and then moved to Holmes county and did better at working with the community. It was by all accounts, and there are a number of people still living who lived there, a phenomenal kind of utopian group. They had a cooperative store. They also had cooperative schooling. An African American woman who became part of the leadership, formed a credit union and that made her the first African American woman in Mississippi to run a bank. They provided health care for the community as a whole. Dr. David Minter, whose son became very active in the student nonviolent coordinating Committee and has very fond recollections of the whole enterprise that ended rather abruptly in the 1950s when they were seen as integrationist, which is a charge that was kind of valid. But in the 1950s, an unacceptable form of behavior and were basically kicked out. It was never a very successful farm. They were not farmers and they weren't very good at farming. But they were dedicated to Christian socialism and to cooperative enterprise.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah, Providence Farm, I thought, you know, it's really interesting. There's also some connections there with the Southern tenant farmers Union as well. Discussions about collaboration assistance, you know, sending people there. But I think the way you painted it, you know, is really accurate. Kind of all of these very high minded ideals. But when it came to the actual farming, maybe not the skill set necessary kind of, you know, like a number of utopian experiments you see throughout American history. Like, we. We've got great ideas, we're going to make things better for people, but kind of when it gets down to the nuts and the bolts, there's some definite challenges that have to be overcome. One thing I like about your book is just the characters that you bring to life. There's a number of standout characters. I couldn't talk about all of them because there's a lot. One's Hazel Brannon Smith, and I think she's really useful for talking about because of her kind of span. Right. So you said she's in the newspaper business roughly around 50 years, so she's seeing a lot of these transitions. But also like the gentleman you referenced earlier, who you said wasn't a liberal but did care about the needs of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, she's somebody who really is interested in kind of justice and following the law and kind of making the world better, but not necessarily, at least initially, an integrationist. So maybe talk a little bit about Hazel Brandon Smith, kind of her trajectory and where she fits into this story of Holmes County.
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Diane T. Feldman
Yeah, she's. She's a very interesting woman. And she, she. She came to Holmes county right out of college in the, in the. I can't remember the exact date, but I believe in the 40s, and got a loan to borrow a little newspaper and then bought another newspaper. She, she very smart and very dedicated to journalism. She had had a. A professor in school in Alabama who talked about the role of journalism within the community and that basically it was the role of journalism to hold elected officials accountable. I think she was never entirely egalitarian and certainly did not favor integration. What she favored was following a law. And her first efforts at that were all around the sort of rampant violation of the liquor laws in Mississippi, which prohibition here started in. I think it was 1906 or something. And so liquor was illegal, but it was so widespread that there was actually an official liquor tax that was levied on bootleggers because there were so many of them. And there's a famous quote that I think I do use in the book that Willie Morris said his father had said the only difference between Mississippi and. And Tennessee, where there was not Prohibition, was that that you could buy liquor on Sunday in Mississippi because it was illegal anyway. So she was sort of muck raking on all of the sheriffs who were ignoring the law and allowing widespread sale of liquor. And that was her first cause after the 1950 Brown versus Board of Education decision in the 1950s. She took the position that while none of us wanted our schools to be integrated, and she believed that black people did not want the schools to be integrated either, which was false, that this was now the law of the land and should therefore happen. In the meantime, the Citizens Council had been formed. The Citizens Councils were. The very first Citizens Council was in Indianola, Mississippi, which is in the Delta. The second was in Holmes County. The Citizens Councils in some ways were most virulent about maintaining segregation in those places that were majority black. Holmes county has never been majority white. It became majority black almost as soon as it became not majority Native American. So it has never had a white majority. And that's actually. It's counties like that where people were most resistant to both integration and voting rights. So I think that from talking to people, virtually all the white people in Holmes county were part of the Citizens Council. And they went after Hazel Brannon Smith because she had a different point of view and was expressing it in her larger paper, the Lexington Advertiser. And basically they formed an alternative paper which still is published in Holmes County. Holmes County Herald financed it and took all her advertising revenue away. She survived for a while, partly with the support of the black community. Medgar Evers and the Mississippi NAACP hired her to do printing of their own newspaper. And she did have yet a third newspaper which still exists and is in Jackson, that continued to have some revenue. And she had some advertising, mostly Smokey the Bear and federal sources. But she sort of was barely hanging on. And then as she became ill, the newspaper folded. But it never returned to what it was before the Holmes County Herald and the withdrawal of all the advertising. Her own attitudes evolve. She starts to simply, we should obey the law. And that's about as far as it went. She knew so little about the black community, even while she was writing in Lexington. She writes about the black community as largely affluent, which it wasn't. There were a few affluent black people whom she knew, most notably Arinia Mallory, who's a major figure in the COGIC Church and in the whole Holmes county story. But the notion that they were affluent was just false, and she just didn't know. She was shocked when she heard about a lynching and the way law enforcement had behaved, you know, so that she started to learn more. But she never became part of what was going on in the county. She was a journalist. She was separate. She had expanding relationships with the black community, but she did not accept their leadership over decisions, political or otherwise, just as an Example, you know, there was kind of an effort in the 60s to. Turned out to be a successful effort to elect the first black state legislator in Mississippi since Reconstruction. She went off and did her own thing on that in a way which didn't ultimately matter, but was just sort of symbolic of her not being part of what was going on within the civil rights network, but staying separate from it. So, you know, she was an interesting personality. She was very attractive. She was apparently quite beautiful when she was young. Brash, a little in your face in a way that's atypical and didn't really go along with anybody, but did certainly evolve in her own racial attitudes and her own approach.
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Matt Simmons
Yeah. Just getting back to what you said, some of the pressure that's applied to her, I think I remember her husband loses his job right at the hospital because she's writing these things in the newspaper that everyone is disagreeing with, and then he has to go work with her in the newspaper, which is, you know, struggling. So she. She pays. She pays a price for kind of holding to. To her ideals.
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Diane T. Feldman
She plays an enormous price. She pays an enormous price. So. And you know that she did get support from the black community and didn't entirely reciprocate the support that she got, which I'm not even saw, because she, you know, was so much raised in a notion that, you know, white and educated is somehow in charge. And she paid a price for that too, frankly.
- [41:53]
Matt Simmons
Yeah. It's interesting. If someone, you know, did a deep kind of case study on kind of the psychology around that, I would be. I'd be fascinated to read that. So kind of staying within the same time period. You mentioned the Brown versus The Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Everyone's very familiar with deliberate speed in Holmes County. What does that look like? I kind of play a game with students sometimes. I say, look, 1954 is when this court case comes down, all deliberate speed. When do you think it's actually going to be implemented? I'll ask students. And they're like, oh, two years, five years, six years. So how long does it take for Holmes county to get to the point where they're actually doing that? And what does it look like on the ground?
- [42:37]
Diane T. Feldman
It doesn't happen until 1969. And a Supreme Court case, which is Alexander v. Holmes, which started in Holmes county, and we're all deliberate speed changed to now all deliberate speed in Holmes County. And Holmes county isn't alone in this, meant as slowly as we can get away with. And it's throughout the south and well, in many, many counties in the south, not all of them, but probably especially in those that had an overwhelming African American majority, what they did was allow, legally allow choice, which meant that you could choose what school you went to. None of the white children were choosing to go to the black schools, but they had separate school systems, maintained separate school systems. And not in the 50s, but 10 years later, Black children were allowed to enroll in the white schools. There was organizing around that, and a number of black children did. There actually is one black high school where they had signed a petition to the school board. They were all going to enroll. There are stories in the book about the children who chose to enroll in the white schools. And they were harassed, their parents were harassed, their parents lost their jobs. And it was hugely difficult, but they did do it. And then in 1969, which obviously is 15 years after Brown versus Board, they were part of a lawsuit, Alexander v. Holmes, out. The Alexander part is a child named Beatrice Alexander, who became the lead plaintiff because Alexander starts with an A, and so she was first alphabetically. But there were a number of students in other counties joined the lawsuit as well. But it was a suit against Holmes county that instead of choice, they needed to move now to have a unitary school system. And it went to the Supreme Court. And is the case that throughout the south went from all deliberate speed to now and ended dual school systems in the South.
- [45:01]
Matt Simmons
The level of opposition, I think from kind of 21st century eyes or perspective, it's just almost hard to believe. I know in one part of the book, they were looking at potentially just disbanding the entire public school system if they had to integrate and the vote count on that. And I'm going to mix up the numbers so you can correct me, but it was like 1000-70 who were in favor of just completely dismantling the public school system. So just burn it all down rather than actually admit African American students, which just left me just. My jaw just kind of dropped as I was reading that, of course, this.
- [45:36]
Diane T. Feldman
Before, there were African American voting rights, so that the African American majority of Holmes county did not participate in that vote. And I think that in the end, in a place like Holmes county, which is now about 85% African American and at that time was still about close to 70% African American, that the notion that school integration would mean black control of the schools and that it was also a step toward voting rights, which would mean black control of political power. And that was the even greater fear that there would simply not be white control of the county anymore.
- [46:18]
Matt Simmons
Yeah. Potentially a wedge. Right. Once this goes and everything is going to change. Right. And representation, people actually having representation in their government, which is a good segue into the first 14. And kind of that initial voter registration push and kind of the origins of that. Something that I thought was really interesting is you talked about the grassroots and one of the individuals you quoted basically saying that, hey, it's really the farmers who are doing all this work. Then the teachers and ministers are swooping in, which is kind of a counter narrative. Right. When you think about civil rights, you think about MLK Jr you think about other ministers, you think about these teachers kind of leading the fray. But at least in Holmes county, this gentleman is saying, well, we really were the ones who got all of this started. So maybe kind of speak to that process, that voting rights process in Holmes County.
- [47:06]
Diane T. Feldman
Now, I should say that because the voting rights process starts a whole lot earlier. There were any number of people who had tried to register vote, and many of them lost their jobs. If you were a public school teacher and you tried to register to vote, you lost your job. If you were a minister and there were white people in your church or you needed any white support, you lost your job or your church was burned down and those things happened. The quote is from a man named Jody Saffold, who was called Preacher. He actually was not a Mileston farmer, but his family name is among those that bought land right after the Civil War, owned land already in the 1870 census. And he said, you know, it wasn't the preachers and the teachers, it was the so called dumb people. It was the farmers. They were economically independent. They weren't going to lose their land, although they did later that they were at less immediate risk of losing their land and had the capacity to do this. And they were organizing at Mileston. There was a group in Mount Bayou, which is in the Delta, that was organizing in the 1950s, and they used to go to the meetings that were held in Mount Bayou with speakers from around the country, including from the naacp, including Thurgood Marshall, who was there around the time of the initial Brown case. So they were involved, but they didn't know sort of quite what to do. The arrival of the students of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee upped the organizing level and the SNCC began organizing in the Delta in Greenwood, which is just up the road from Holmes county, and all of the Holmes county and Mileston group started going. Rosie Head, who was a teenager and figures prominently in the book, and her son Calvin is the current executive director of the Milestone Co Op. So all of this connects all the way through the book used to participate. And what SNCC basically said is you need to go as a group and organize the group and be prepared for what's going to happen. And so the first 14, most of whom were Mileston Co Op, lived in the Milestone Co Op area. But some additional, like Jody Saffold, went together to the courthouse to register. Now, there were actually more than 14, and there were some they had to go every day for a period. And most of them never got registered or never until the nineteen nineteen sixty six Voting Rights act, but they went every day. And so there were. There were people who were involved in that who are not listed in the newspaper as being in the first 14. So it was probably really 20 something, but it's called the first 14. And that was one of the first organized SNCC efforts within the Mississippi Delta. There was lots of activity elsewhere in Mississippi at that point, but it really was the first organized effort in the Delta and elevated those who were involved into a leadership position. All of those who were involved, one of the best known is Hartman Turnbow, whose farm and house was later firebombed by vigilantes and who spoke at the 1964 convention about it. Rothes Hayes, who has passed away as has Hartman Turnbow, was also very much part of the organizing for Alexander V. Holmes and stayed with it and had been part of the group that had gone to the meetings in Mount Bayou. So it existed before sncc. SNCC gave it impetus and training and support which evolved into the Holmes County Civil rights movement and ultimately the election of the first black legislator in Mississippi since Reconstruction, Robert Clark, whose son Bryant Clark is the state representative now. And the Alexander V. Holmes case and many things that have happened since as well as before.
- [51:30]
Matt Simmons
Yeah. So kind of moving forward and sticking with that theme of farming local black leaders. Rudalton Hart. I may have mispronounced his first name.
- [51:40]
Diane T. Feldman
Ridalton Hart.
- [51:41]
Matt Simmons
Yeah, Ridalton Hart. So maybe we can talk a little bit about him as we're kind of moving forward through the 1960s, after the 1960s to the present. That's chapter five of your book. What does his farming experience look like and how does that illustrate some of the trends that are happening after civil rights that are impacting black farmers in Holmes County?
- [52:00]
Diane T. Feldman
I'm not sure I'd say we have gone to after civil rights. Just.
- [52:03]
Matt Simmons
You're right. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that you're Right. It feels like we're regressing a little bit, and I didn't. Yeah. So, yeah. Excuse that. That's a faux pas on my part.
- [52:11]
Diane T. Feldman
The Rudolph and Heart story is a really sad tale of success, sort of followed by then being cut off at the knees. And this is a story about the. About the 1980s and 19 and into the. Into the 21st century. He had. The Hart family were landowning farmers right outside of Lexington, not down in the Delta, and had. I mean, but they had a story about land ownership dating back to even before. So the Hart family land does date back to immediately after slavery. And I tell that story in the book. Rhodalton Hart, who was a university graduate, decided to take over the family farm and became one of the largest landowners in the Delta. He was dedicated to having the farm be big, to using the most modern equipment. And he and his brothers ended up with over 10,000 acres that they own throughout the Delta. When Congressman Mike Espey became Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary Espy. Well, first, when he became a member of Congress, he was the first black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected from Mississippi. His background was. He was a lawyer, he was an attorney, and his family owned a chain of funeral homes. He wasn't a farmer. And yet agriculture is so critical to that district. He wanted to learn more, and he and Rudolph and Hart became friends. He then became Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton administration and was indicted for accepting gifts. These were very minor gifts, like sports tickets from agricultural interests. He was acquitted of all charges, but in the meantime, that investigation spread to people who were his friends. And so when the Ridalton Hart applied for a loan, which farmers, just because farming is seasonal, always rely on loans. And when disasters happen, flood, excessive storms, it's just simply part of the process and has been for 100 years. He was denied because his file had been turned over to the special investigator of Secretary Espy. And he ended up unable to get a loan and then renegotiating it so that he could. And then he was indicted for allegedly bribing a Agriculture Department of Agriculture employee, for which there really wasn't much evidence. He was sent to jail. And then he was acquitted on appeal, fully acquitted. But in the meantime, he owed all of this money, and the United States Department of Agriculture took his land. And when he died of a heart attack at age 57, as all of this is going on, his wife, who therefore owed the loan, couldn't pay it. And had they sold all the land or most of the land to the Department of Agriculture. His two sons are still involved in agriculture. One son works for the United States Department of Agriculture. The other one works in an agribusiness. And they want to rebuild. But it's a very sad and difficult tale of which the USDA is not the hero.
- [56:02]
Matt Simmons
So we're running close to the time. I have a couple of questions, though, still, actually, I have lots of questions. We could go through all of them, but we just don't have time to. One is kind of Holmes county today. What does that look like? What are some of these? You've been talking about some different themes and trends and changes that you've seen over the course of writing your book. So thinking about poverty, job loss, displacement, kind of future prospects. Right. For Holmes County, Mississippi, what does that picture look like from your perspective? After doing so much deep research and kind of understanding that community, so much better than a lot of other people like myself. What does that look like?
- [56:41]
Diane T. Feldman
Mixed, I would say. On the negative side, the. The loss of African American farmland has cost Holmes county tremendously. While at one time there were almost a thousand landowning African American farmers in Holmes county, there are now less than 200. That farm mechanization and consolidation, which has happened all over the country but in Holmes county, meant that basically the transfer of land from black people to white people. And so the land that is farmed there, and there's still a lot of cotton grown in Holmes county, is now farmed by large corporate entities. And the African American farmers cannot always compete with that and are not growing cotton. In any case, it sounds like a farm mechanization story, but those who were active in the civil rights movement had their land taken from them by decisions on the part of the usda, by tax sales, by a whole set of processes that were, in fact, discriminatory. And there. There's a great deal of information about USDA discriminating against African American farmers. And there have been a number of court cases on it. Holmes county is right in the middle of all of that.
- [58:04]
Matt Simmons
And there are awards made. Correct, but not enough. You can't get a farm back once it's gone. It was like $50,000, something like that.
- [58:11]
Diane T. Feldman
And a lot of people didn' get that. Yeah, I mean, you've lost, you know, you've lost all that acreage. $50,000. Didn't get it back. And. And lots of people were not, in fact, compensated. There were. You had to have. In some. In. For some of those awards, you have to have proven discrimination. And that. That has a process. So the Reality is, is that there has been a wealth transfer away from the African American farmers of Holmes county to white corporate farming. USDA policies also after World War II were all about farm consolidation and about preserving the cotton industry. So the amount of pesticides and herbicides that were dropped in the Delta have made it difficult to produce anything except cotton and animal feed products. Doing organic farming is a challenge there, although it's a challenge that's being met. And so Holmes county is one of the lowest income counties in Mississippi at this point. It has lost more than half of its population, can't sustain the businesses that were there. That's true throughout the Delta and to some degree that's true throughout rural America. It's just a little bit more extreme in Holmes county. And there hasn't really been a reinvestment in Holmes county and in much of rural America to build that back. That's the negative side. The positive side is that a lot of the same families are there and the same spirit is there. And there is an effort, it's a difficult effort, but an effort at food production. Now, especially with there being there's a problem of food distribution. And even though the Delta has some of the richest land in the world, it is something of a food desert. And there are a lot of cooperative efforts, especially right now with SNAP benefits having been cut. That's the food stamp program of how to distribute food to people. So Milestone grows food electronic hydroponically. There are other small food producing farms in Holmes County. They're never going to get rich, but they are going to sustain. And there's still very much of a spirit. I mentioned the National Federation of Colored Farmers sign, that historical marker that went up, financed by the Holmes County Migration Foundation. Dr. Sylvia Giss for the sign is up at Mount Zion Church in Howard, which is pastored by Reverend Melvin Russell, whose father, Reverend J.J. russell, was one of the two ministers who were very active early on in the first 14. And part of that and half the people who were there had lands that dated back to the Federal loan Act of 1916. And they're all very much of a community and mutually supportive and supportive of Milestone and trying to do what they can to preserve the community, feed it and grow it back. So the spirits there, the Church of God in Christ is still very active there. The new mayor of Lexington is Dr. Percy Washington, who is pastor of Sweet Canaan Church of God in Christ, the second oldest church of God in Christ in the world, which was actually founded by members of the National Federation of Colored Farmers. So it all ties together and it's all still there. But it certainly has challenges that are new and different and very, very difficult moving forward.
- [62:13]
Matt Simmons
So the last question I'm going to ask you is what's next? So this is an incredibly in depth but also succinct kind of look at Holmes county, its connection to the experience of black farmers, civil rights, Pentecostalism. Really. There's just so many interesting themes in your book. So is there a follow up project? What is the next thing that you're working on?
- [62:40]
Diane T. Feldman
The next thing I'm working on has some similarities, but it's also different. I will Holmes county will never leave me and I will always be available to anybody there that I can be helpful to. I went to the historic marker dedication this weekend and I still keep in touch with people there. The Pentecostalism piece is sort of connected in my next project, which is I'm working on a book less than, I mean, a third of the way or 25% of the way into it. It'll take me several years on women. Basically the working title is Practicing Freedom Mississippi Women's Civil War to Suffrage. And what I hope to do is to trace different attitudes toward freedom among elite white women, non elite white women, and black women during a period when none of them had the right to vote. And so I'm working on that. The Holiness movement is a significant part of that book since it was for gender equality in some ways up to a point, as well as racial equality. So that's what I'm working on now.
- [63:55]
Matt Simmons
Well, that sounds fascinating. I'm looking forward to that, even though, as you said, it may take a little bit for that to come out. So thank you so much. Diane T. Feldman, your book Borrowed Land, Stolen labor and the Holy Spirit. I really enjoyed reading the book and I really enjoyed talking with you today. Thank you so much.
- [64:13]
Diane T. Feldman
Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate.