The Legal History of Post-Emancipation and Farm Labor and Plantation Related Mortality from 1880 to 1950

With the end of the American Civil War, the legal practice of plantation slavery ended, but different forms of extractive farm labor, such as farm tenancy, emerged in its wake. This study is focused on the history of state and federal farm law, how it transformed after emancipation, and the health impacts of this legal history for farmworkers. While there are many public health studies investigating health disparities across the rural/urban divide, less attention has been given to the legal and structural factors driving negative health outcomes in rural communities. To assess the link between farm governance after emancipation and health outcomes on rural farmlands, we focused on the Blackland Prairies Ecoregion of Texas, one of the densest agricultural regions in the US which witnessed a disproportionately rapid growth of the farm tenancy system after emancipation. We first analyzed legal archives at the federal and state levels to trace the governance of agricultural labor over time. Next, we compiled publicly available vital records data for 2,544 individuals born in four Blackland counties (Dallas, Ellis, Hill, and Navarro) between 1880-1900. The effects of farm labor status on lifespan were evaluated using Kruskall-Wallis tests (p=4.238e-07) and ANOVA (p=2.64e-07). Results indicate that the legal landscape of farm labor after emancipation helped drive a more widespread and racially diverse decline in life expectancies in the Blacklands region. These findings extend our understanding of how federal and state farm law helped reproduce losses of life on rural farmlands after emancipation.

My name is, and I am presenting the legal history of post-emancipation and farm labor and plantation, related mortality from 1880 to 1950.

As a government and anthropology Major, I was very excited to be able to include both that incorporate both fields into this one study.

Where we start, our project is talking about the structural violence at a criminal plantation as a for foundational form of colonial violence in the Americas, and it peaked in the 19 twenties in Texas.Where violence on plantation began with dispossession and enslave enough indigenous and Africans people in the early colonial period. In 1,865, we reach emancipation for those in texas who finally heard the news, and following that States shifted legal and regulatory systems for plantation laborer and developed systems of farm tenancy where laborers lived and worked on land owned by others, which then contributes the current model that is used to explain health outcomes by using the rural and urban divide called the Rural Mortality Penalty, which is the belief that if you live in rural area you have more native health outcomes than if you were to live in an urban area.

Our ethical approach is that we really wanted this to be a community-driven project. Dr. Rick Smith is a descendant of the community, and we’ve Been working with the Ellis County Rural Heritage Farm, located in Waxahachie, Texas for the entirety of the project, which mine is simply a part of.

So the objective of our project is to evaluate the link between farm labor, deregulation and regulations, plantation, labor, and mortality.

The area which we are studying is Dallas County, as well as the Ellis Hill and Navarro counties within the black man’s region of Texas.

Our methods we compiled a legal history of State and Federal actions that impacted the lives of tenant farmers in the South. We evaluated mortalities across the role and urban divide by compiling data on individuals that were born and died in the Blackland counties, which is Ellis Hail and Navarro and the urban county of Dallas, born between 1,880 and 1,900, we collected 2,536 individuals, and with those individuals we conducted a Crystal Wallace test, as well as the survival analysis in R.

Now this this is our chart that shows the amount of people that we collected from different counties, and what they were categorized as.

Now. What we found in the policy is financial aid to farmers were attempts at the government put in place. Once they found out about the system of tenant farming that was formed without any laws and without any form of cash that was simple. Roll over from the plantation, from slavery directly into the tenant from a system. So once the Federal Government became aware of this and the post Emancipation. They attempted to enact these laws such as the Homestead Act, the Bank of Jones action, the firm Security administration, all of which were supposed to uplift these communities and provide financial aid to them to buy land and give them access to land that they hadn’t had. However, all of these acts failed because they didn’t provide them enough money to be able to actually purchase the lander, be able to afford the things that they need to be able to actually farm and live on this land, and in trying to improve their conditions. There is even a Court Case Block v. Hirsh. In which they were barred from being able to actually improve their living quarters, because if they did, then it only belonged to the land owner rather than to themselves. And the Southern tenant Farmer Union is something that arose out of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. And this community was fighting for better treatment and fighting for better qualities within the conditions that they were living in. All of which we’re fighting because the Federal Government wasn’t giving this community the things that they needed to be able to survive.

And what we found is that these population ones really were suffering. And so, when we look at the data that we found this is our age, average age of death. You can clearly see the rural and urban divide: urban people living longer than those who live in rural areas. However, when you break the rural population down between those who are not working on the plantation and those who are working on the plantation. You can see that those who are working who are owning the land instead of working it, are living just as long as those living in urban areas, and it’s those who are forced to work the land are stuck in this tenant farming system that are suffering and losing years of their lives. As a result,

However, that data sometimes can be skewed by population booms which we’re also occurring at this time. So we then turn to a survival analysis in which you can see that the same plantation workers are less likely to survive from one year to the next than any person living in any other area.

So clearly from this we can see that it’s not the fact that you’re living in a rural area. It’s the fact that you’re working on these former plantations and existing within this tenant farming system with this consistent form of violence that comes along with that.

So our conclusion from this is that the lack of regulation and federal and State protections for tenant farmers likely influenced these health disparities that exploited these farm workers, and the systematic violence on plantations is a more highly explanatory factor for disparities in mortality than simply the rural and urban divide alone. Going forward, greater attention to legal histories and systematic violence are necessary to be able to evaluate the root causes of these rural health disparities

Finally to acknowledge the people who have helped produce this work as a project as a whole. We like to acknowledge the lives and labor of Texas farm workers in the past, and we thank the members of the Board of the Ellis County role, Heritage Farm Generational knowledge of Texas farmers and farmlands help shape our thinking in this work. We are also grateful to the members of the critical molecular anthropology lab at George Mason and to Daniel Temple and Charles Rosen for their work on this work, and I would also like to thank my mentor, Dr. Vick Smith, for all of his help, and inviting me onto this project, as well as Oscar for helping me to produce this research.

Thank you.