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This program is made possible in part
by the Mississippi Humanities Council

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under a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities.

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The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent
those of the Mississippi Humanities Council

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or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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The following program contains the use of racial epithets
in historical context and to recount personal experiences.

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Viewer discretion is advised.

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In the decades
following the abolishment of slavery in America,

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Mississippi has the second-largest population
of Black farmland owners.

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Survivors and descendants of survivors of the mob violence
of the Radical Reconstruction Period, their land ownership

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came to be despite a slew of discriminatory obstructions
and constitutional rights violations.

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“[In 1871, Mississippi] reports came in of Warren
Tyler, foully murdered at Meridian; of Aaron Moore

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banished and his house destroyed; of Mayor Sturgis
driven from Meridian; of Tom Hornburger,

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a freedman literally shot to pieces
April 24th; [and] near Hood’s Church, of another freedman

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shot and killed.” The Autobiography of Oliver
Otis Howard, Major General United States Army

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From states outlawing

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land ownership, to unfulfilled labor contracts, to the debt
cycle of sharecropping,

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land ownership was intentionally
being placed out of the reach of newly freed Black people.

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Through all of this, by the early 1900s, more than 20,000
Black farmers managed to acquire land in Mississippi.

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However, the majority of Black farmers were still
sharecroppers, still struggling to achieve land ownership.

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Daddy would give one fourth his crop to the White man,

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but he had to pay for everything. Paid for his seed,
his fertilizer.

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And the White man had some unbelievable charges,
he did, you know.

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It was not right.

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Take out all kind of stuff.

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When he got through trimming it off,
you didn’t get too much.

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The structure of sharecropping is best understood
by looking at the South’s history in the years

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following the Civil War defeat. When the war ends in 1865,

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land ownership is immediately included in the conversation
concerning the formerly enslaved.

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Whites knew that if they didn’t sell Black people land
that Black people would not have real independence.

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And so that was a major way of limiting Black upward
mobility.

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Black people wanted land because they understood their
power, their agency, their need for self-determination.

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They could do it with land.

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That’s what it takes.

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It’s just to have your own
so that you can grow and build and leverage from there.

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But while the idea of issuing 40 acres
and a mule is being proposed, Southern states are enacting

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Black Codes – laws that,
among other things, outlaw landownership for Black people.

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Black Codes were essentially a holdover from Slave Codes.

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White Southerners in 1865, in 1866, they wanted to recreate
something as close to antebellum slavery as they could.

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So they set up a different set of laws
that Black people had to abide by,

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that White people did not have to abide by
and these were the Black Codes.

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These laws also require that Black people work under
labor contracts or be deemed a vagrant and be imprisoned.

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If you were a Black person and if you were idle,

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you could be picked up and thrown
into some kind of levee camp

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and so a lot of those people
who just might not have had a job,

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might have just been walking down the street –
they were picked up.

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Looking White folks in the eye
or having an argument with somebody or any of those things.

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You’re going to find yourself back in jail,
which meant that you’re back in slavery.

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The threat of a lifetime of working land that was not
your own loomed for the newly freed Black people.

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If you became a ward of the state

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and sent to the penitentiary for a misdemeanor crime,
the state could lease you out to a plantation owner.

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It could lease you out to a railroad magnate.

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It could lease you out to a mining company.

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The Black Codes are short lived, but the impacts were long
term as labor contracts continue throughout Reconstruction.

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The proposal of granting land to the formerly enslaved
for their more than 400 years of labor

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is replaced with more labor contracts
under the order of President Andrew Johnson.

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This is when sharecropping gets its start.

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Now, consider this–Black
people had worked on those plantations forever for free,

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and so many of them felt like they were owed land.

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This was according to William Tecumseh Sherman,
another Civil War General

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who came up with the idea of 40 acres and a mule –
that was proposed in his Special Field Order No. 15.

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Well, that didn’t happen.

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Instead, Black people continue to work land
under the promise of acquiring money

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to buy their own and the withdrawal of the federal troops
marks the end of the Radical Reconstruction Period.

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By now sharecropping is in its full form
and proving to be unprosperous,

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but federal support for Black Americans is waning
and any political progress dismantled.

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Sharecropping is here to stay.

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The people that were in charge in the South,
the former Confederacy, oftentimes

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were people who were actually a part of the Confederacy.

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So White Southerners who had fought the Union
were then put back in charge.

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So they were unfair.

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They were unfair toward Black people.

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And that’s how sharecropping began.

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They were pencil-whipped with the bookkeeping
because most folks could not at that point

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really read a full-fledged contract.

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And so though we went into it,
our African people went into it in good faith,

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it was just a neo form of slavery, really.

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And they called it sharecropping,
but it was essentially still the same thing –

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going from a system of no pay to very low pay
and in fact, no pay at the end of the day.

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Still some Black people saw a career in farming – a job
they’d done for centuries when enslaved.

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But, before they could get to independent farming,
they’d have to go through sharecropping first.

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One generation removed from slavery, John Harris
and the majority of Black

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farmers are working in a system that keeps Black farmers
poor, while White landowners are wealthy.

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Around 1939, John moves his family from Pace to Perthshire
to work as a sharecropper on the Knowlton plantation.

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The Harris Family work for Maury
Knowlton, son of Sam Knowlton.

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The Knowlton family arrive in Bolivar County
from Arkansas in 1889, first as land renters -

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a privilege unavailable to Black men.

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Most Whites in the South who didn’t own land,
they were land renters.

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That was the best situation
if one could not afford to purchase land.

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But for White landowners that was too much independence
for Blacks to be land renters.

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By 1906, Sam’s father, Pole Knowlton, purchases
the land that he has rented for years,

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after Sam first purchases the neighboring land.

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The number of acres cover miles and the town of Perthshire
becomes known as the Knowlton Plantation.

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During that time, the prices were pretty good for cotton.

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You get more from cotton then, than you can now.

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Because when a bale is ginned

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and the seeds is taken out and pressed it’s about 500lbs
and you looking at about three or $400 a bale.

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See how much money they was getting? That’s
the reason white people got so rich then.

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They was getting good price for their crops
and then didn’t give Daddy but $4500.

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It was hard for a sharecropper to really have a profit.

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You know, you go all year long working

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and then when harvest comes, the land owner says, well,
you owe rent and you owe for

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buying things out the store –
the plantations would have these stores.

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By the time that profit comes in from that harvest, you’ve
got to pay him back. So it’s pretty still much slavery.

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You’ve worked for pennies and it definitely wasn’t
equivalent to the labor that you put in.

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We’re talking about families of ten children
and more working from kin to can’t each have a quota.

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And if they didn’t make that quota,
they would be beaten just like enslavement.

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But now by the parent, unfortunately,
because the pressure was on the father and the mothers

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to produce a certain number
or else they would be kicked off of the plantation

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and be virtually homeless with all these children.
And so the pressure was on them.

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Sharecropping was an unfair economic system.

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It was a system not too unlike

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feudal lord systems in Europe.

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The landlord. Right. That’s
where the history of that term came from.

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They basically took that.

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You have a lot of landless peasants
living in the feudal system.

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You have Black sharecroppers
that own no land doing all the work.

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They usually owed more money than they made.

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Now, of course, they were being paid paltry wages
and so they were never going to overcome that.

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And so that’s why sharecropping was an unequal system
and an unfair system.

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But some Black farmers like John are refusing to accept
this system, and set their sights on land of their own.

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It was two men, two brothers lived in Friar’s Point and

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they owned land from Friar’s Point
all the way to Delta Pine, that was down below Greenville.

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And when they got to be old men,
they got tired of worrying with it

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and they chopped it
up, begin to sell it in 120 and 200 [acre] lots and

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stuff like that.

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So, Julius Christian was dating my older sister,
Minnie Pearl.

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So Julius, they had bought some land over there.

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And so Daddy said, well,
I heard they was selling land up to Desson and

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I wanted to know if they still got some land.
He said, Yeah, they got a plenty land and sale.

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It’s 1949 and the land is priced at $10,000.

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The down payment is a thousand.

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This is John’s chance to escape sharecropping.

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But John’s pay date poses a problem for the aspiring landowner because he wants to move his family before Christmas.

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Resettlement time,

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they call it, that’s when they got ready to give you
a little something for your work – it wasn’t fair.

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So we had picked out 50 bales by hand that year because
we would pick two bales a day with the family we had.

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It was about ten of us in the field and we all picked from

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100 to 200 to 300 lbs a day.

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So Daddy told him that he needed some money
before resettlement time.

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Daddy was always smart, and when you outsmart the White man
you gotta be pretty smart.

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Daddy didn’t have no hair on his head – he was bald headed
and Daddy went in there and scratched his head like this.

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He said Mr. Maury Knowlton said John, what’s wrong with you?

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You know when a n— come to a White man

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during that time - I’m sorry to use that language
but that’s what they used - you know,

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you had to scratch your head and pull your hat off,
you know you had to scratch your head.

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That’s to give him honor. It’s
not that Daddy wanted to do that,

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but he had to con to con him, you know.

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He said,
well my children done worked hard.

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He said they picked out 50 bales this year.
Yeah John they sure have.

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What you need for them?

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He said it’s getting cold and they need some warm
clothes for school and I need to get some money.

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I wait till the 15th it’s gonna be too late.

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He said alright what you need?

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He said well I need 2000

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but I can settle for 15 hundred (laughs).

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He said, well you can get it.

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He gave him that 1500 dang dollars.

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Daddy paid 1000 dollars down on the land, had 500 to buy
clothes with and to get set up at the new house.

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He left some of his mules, over at the old place
at Perthshire and we began to move at night.

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He had a wagon and it was Lawrence, Rufus, and myself
and my twin brother.

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We was moving at night and the women stayed in the house.

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Had a few mules in the lot
so the white man thought we was still there.

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Left sheets and stuff to the windows
like we was still there.

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When your family got a little larger
he would add a new room to your house

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but you had to sign a contract that you was gon
be there the next year.

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I don’t know if Daddy signed that contract or not
but they built him another room.

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I think he told Daddy, Naw ain’t no use in
you signing a contract because I know you gon be here.

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Daddy said, Yes sir, you know I ain’t going nowhere.

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When we got ready to moving everything, he went and told

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Mr. Maury Knowlton that he had bought him some land.
He said, John, You’s a smart n—. Daddy laughed.

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He said I never would have thought a n— had that much sense.

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He said how much money you owe?
Daddy told him how much he paid for the land.

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He said, You know you owe 90 hundred dollars?

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And that wasn’t but $9000
and so the White man tried to make it sound big.

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Daddy said yes sir.

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He said that’s a lot of money.

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Daddy said, yes sir,
but I been paying you a lot of money too (laughs).

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The only freedom that a Black man had was a mule
and 40 acres of land what they promised to give him.

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And so they kind of reneged on that.

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A few of them got it
and and all of them didn’t get it before they shut it down.

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But Daddy was able to buy
120 acres of land in Deeson, Mississippi.

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It was just like the promised land.

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It was crops already in the field
and Daddy had about ten head of mules

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and about ten head of cows.

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And we had a whole lot of animals.

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And it was already set up when we got here.

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Three houses on the place when we got here.

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From that we all resided here until the family began
to scatter and went different parts of the country.

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23,293 Mississippi farms are Black owned by 1950

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and 5,647 are partly Black owned totaling more than 2
million acres.

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Black land ownership was at its height around 1920.

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A significant percentage of Black farmers
still existed in Mississippi and throughout the South.

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John Harris joins that number in November of 1949,
just before a drastic decline.

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That was the last decade
where Blacks owned any substantive amount of land.

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They began to lose land after that for for myriad reasons.

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After 1950 through 1969, roughly 6 million acres of

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Black owned farmland across
America is lost or dispossessed, largely due to racism.

00:16:20.245 --> 00:16:24.950
The federal government gave assistance to white landowners.

00:16:24.950 --> 00:16:28.487
They didn’t give that assistance to Black landowners.

00:16:28.487 --> 00:16:33.692
And so that dictated a lot of the migration
during that period.

00:16:33.692 --> 00:16:41.834
And as Blacks began to leave Mississippi,
then the land could be taken away for not paying your taxes.

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A lot of Black land was lost during that period.

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We can’t talk about this without talking about people
being just strong armed off their property.

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What I mean by that is simply ran off it.

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If I come and shoot your house up
because I want your property,

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if I burn crosses in front of your house
because I want your property.

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Sooner or later you’re going to say, to hell with this, I’m
going up North. And that’s what a lot of our people did.

00:17:03.689 --> 00:17:07.593
And so they left the land and whoever wanted it took it.

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And so there’s a lot of ill-gotten land,
especially here in the state of Mississippi,

00:17:11.663 --> 00:17:15.734
that people were just strong armed off of.
They were pushed off their land.

00:17:15.734 --> 00:17:23.909
That was the tactics used by many of these people
to get rid of Black folk and to steal their land.

00:17:23.909 --> 00:17:28.347
Raping of the women and all the girls in the house,
all that kind of madness

00:17:28.347 --> 00:17:31.483
that when they left, they didn’t want to come back here.

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I still hear those stories.
I know people who live here in the city of Jackson.

00:17:35.921 --> 00:17:38.524
When I was doing the urban farming, we had a lady come up.

00:17:38.524 --> 00:17:42.194
She she said, I hadn’t picked okra in 70 years, son.

00:17:42.194 --> 00:17:44.530
She said we were ran off our property.

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You know, we stayed outside of Canton.
We were ran off our property. We moved here to the city.

00:17:49.168 --> 00:17:53.505
It is in this climate that John
not only buys land of his own,

00:17:53.505 --> 00:18:00.813
but will provide his family with a life of small advantages
only made possible through land ownership –

00:18:01.246 --> 00:18:07.953
like a family cemetery for dignified burials, and homes
built for his sons when they got married.

00:18:08.587 --> 00:18:14.593
This was the power of land that the formerly enslaved
sought at the end of the Civil War.

00:18:19.832 --> 00:18:22.234
John Harris’ life gives a picture

00:18:22.234 --> 00:18:28.240
of what Mississippi is like for the generation
of Black Americans born to formerly enslaved people.

00:18:28.607 --> 00:18:33.512
My mom was a very sweet person and she loved John Harris.

00:18:33.512 --> 00:18:37.182
She said he was a good looking Black man.

00:18:37.182 --> 00:18:42.554
He was very intelligent
and he was a peculiar fellow. Wasn’t afraid of nobody.

00:18:42.554 --> 00:18:47.226
I mean, he was a man and he always said
be a man amongst men.

00:18:47.226 --> 00:18:48.861
It was a cow.

00:18:48.861 --> 00:18:54.600
When you had herds, they put a bell on this cow
because she would lead the whole herd.

00:18:55.300 --> 00:18:56.935
He call her a bell cow.

00:18:56.935 --> 00:19:01.306
He said, if you can’t be a bell cow, gallop in the gang,
but don’t be on the tail.

00:19:01.306 --> 00:19:04.510
Daddy, he was a religious man.

00:19:04.510 --> 00:19:09.381
But he and the preacher couldn’t get along.
He know too much about preacher.

00:19:09.381 --> 00:19:12.718
He was like my brother Odie.

00:19:12.718 --> 00:19:17.222
What came to his mind?
He was gon say it. Didn’t care where he was.

00:19:17.222 --> 00:19:24.763
And they were scared for Daddy to preach at the church
cause he was gon open up all the can of worms that was shut up.

00:19:26.031 --> 00:19:30.469
He used to drink his liquor and the preacher

00:19:30.469 --> 00:19:32.104
wanted to turn him out the church because he drink.

00:19:32.104 --> 00:19:38.076
He said, I guess it’s alright for me to say this, he said
they ain’t nothing but whoremongers.

00:19:38.076 --> 00:19:41.480
I ought to drink a little whiskey.

00:19:41.480 --> 00:19:46.652
When John is born, slavery has ended just 24 years prior.

00:19:46.652 --> 00:19:52.658
Daddy was raised by a White man
and all he know was work hard.

00:19:52.791 --> 00:19:54.626
And then he went to the military.

00:19:54.626 --> 00:19:56.962
And the military, all they knew was cursing you.

00:19:56.962 --> 00:20:01.500
And then tried to make you what they wanted you to be.

00:20:01.500 --> 00:20:07.539
John is born in 1889 to freed people Nathan and Isabella.

00:20:07.573 --> 00:20:10.309
His mama died when he was very young.

00:20:10.309 --> 00:20:12.077
According to Census records,

00:20:12.077 --> 00:20:19.084
Isabella dies sometime between 1893 and 1896,
when John is between five and eight years old.

00:20:20.419 --> 00:20:26.124
Nathan is remarried in 1896 to a woman named Caroline,
and at some point,

00:20:26.124 --> 00:20:29.161
Nathan sends John to live with another family.

00:20:29.161 --> 00:20:38.036
His Daddy couldn’t take care of them and work too
so this here White man came to him, Sillers, and asked him

00:20:38.036 --> 00:20:44.042
if he would let his little boy stay with his little boy –
they was about the same age and be company to him.

00:20:44.042 --> 00:20:50.249
John is sent to live as a playmate to Walter Sillers Junior,
who grows up to become a prominent political figure

00:20:50.249 --> 00:20:54.586
as the longest serving speaker
of the Mississippi House of Representatives.

00:20:55.587 --> 00:21:01.627
Celebrated as a legislator, several state and university
buildings are named in his honor.

00:21:01.627 --> 00:21:08.200
Son of the chairman of the state Levee Board –
which was once considered the most powerful political job

00:21:08.200 --> 00:21:14.206
in the Mississippi Delta – he also becomes
an avid opponent of integration and civil rights.

00:21:16.275 --> 00:21:21.380
Aunt Julia, I think her oldest sister taken her in

00:21:21.380 --> 00:21:22.681
and finished raising her.

00:21:22.681 --> 00:21:24.850
So this here White man raised Daddy.

00:21:24.850 --> 00:21:29.121
And so it was an advantage to him also.

00:21:29.121 --> 00:21:36.995
His wife was a school teacher, and she taught him
how to read and how to write, spell his name and how to add.

00:21:36.995 --> 00:21:42.768
When he left that house, he married

00:21:42.768 --> 00:21:43.802
his first wife.

00:21:43.802 --> 00:21:47.739
He had a daughter
called Willie Mae – actually was his oldest daughter.

00:21:47.739 --> 00:21:52.477
He married Ella Mae and that’s when they began a new family.

00:21:52.477 --> 00:22:01.186
John fathers 13 children between the 1920s and 1948:
Willie Mae, John Jr, Nathan, Minnie Pearl,

00:22:01.453 --> 00:22:09.795
Charles Lawrence, Willie Rufus, Bennie Lee, Henry
Lee, Bertha, Odie, Tommy, James and Ella Mae.

00:22:10.529 --> 00:22:14.132
He named a lot of his sons after his brothers.

00:22:14.132 --> 00:22:16.201
Most families did that then.

00:22:16.201 --> 00:22:21.273
It kept their family names alive.
He always taught us go decent.

00:22:21.273 --> 00:22:24.843
And he said, If you have
but one pair pants to wash it at night,

00:22:24.843 --> 00:22:28.447
sit on it and get the wrinkles out
and put it on the next day.

00:22:28.447 --> 00:22:32.284
He wore shined shoes and his pants were pressed.

00:22:32.284 --> 00:22:37.055
The creases were so, look like they cut your hand.
The creases was so sharp.

00:22:37.055 --> 00:22:39.324
He said something decent don’t go out of style.

00:22:39.324 --> 00:22:44.696
He said, But all this old stylish stuff,
he said it’s here and out the door.

00:22:44.696 --> 00:22:46.531
No loud colors.

00:22:46.531 --> 00:22:49.067
He said that them monkey colors.

00:22:49.067 --> 00:22:54.473
Loud suits, you know white suits and yellow suits.
He said them monkey colors. He said you don’t wear that.

00:22:54.473 --> 00:22:59.378
And so his suit was dark blue, gray, brown or black.

00:22:59.378 --> 00:23:02.114
So Daddy was a man that looked way ahead.

00:23:02.114 --> 00:23:07.552
He looked beyond his days.
He was very intelligent. Daddy would take cars to pieces.

00:23:07.552 --> 00:23:14.393
Daddy had a ‘29 Chevrolet and he would cut the back part off
it and make a pickup truck out of it.

00:23:14.393 --> 00:23:17.295
And not only that,

00:23:17.295 --> 00:23:24.302
he put a fifth wheel on the back
just like those transfer trucks have to put long beds on.

00:23:24.302 --> 00:23:26.071
He made that wheel.

00:23:26.071 --> 00:23:33.912
Known as blacksmithing, John uses a coal forge with a hand
crank blower to create tools and alter metal.

00:23:34.713 --> 00:23:36.515
He had, it was just like a barbeque grill.

00:23:36.515 --> 00:23:42.721
You put coals there, but you turn that blower
and that fire would just blow and it get hot.

00:23:42.954 --> 00:23:47.459
And he could burn that metal so, melt it
so that it melted together and weld it.

00:23:47.459 --> 00:23:53.398
Blacksmithing was a skilled trade during the antebellum
period and after the antebellum period.

00:23:53.398 --> 00:24:00.272
It was a skilled trade that some Blacks on plantations
absolutely were trained in.

00:24:00.572 --> 00:24:06.311
In addition to being a valuable asset on the plantation,
the plantation owner

00:24:06.311 --> 00:24:13.552
could lease out the blacksmith to other people
and get cash money for leasing out the blacksmith.

00:24:17.222 --> 00:24:22.661
Henry’s generation continues
the story of the African American farmer in Mississippi.

00:24:22.661 --> 00:24:27.866
Between endless laboring,
these grandchildren of formerly enslaved Black people

00:24:27.866 --> 00:24:33.705
managed to create time for recreation –
a newfound privilege for this group of Americans.

00:24:33.705 --> 00:24:37.142
We played together.
We played ball, we jumped rope and stuff.

00:24:37.142 --> 00:24:40.879
But all of this was on mostly on a Sunday evening.

00:24:40.879 --> 00:24:44.483
Because during the week, Daddy didn’t have no playing.
We had to work.

00:24:44.483 --> 00:24:46.885
But we got most of our playing on Sunday.

00:24:46.885 --> 00:24:51.356
But he didn’t want us to play no ball on Sundays.
Said it was wrong to play ball on Sunday.

00:24:51.356 --> 00:24:57.362
So we could play ball on a Saturday evening
after we come out the field.

00:24:57.496 --> 00:25:03.168
Hailed as America’s favorite pastime,
baseball is also popular among Black farmers.

00:25:03.168 --> 00:25:09.541
It was the lead sport because the Dodgers,
they had some Black players on the team.

00:25:10.041 --> 00:25:14.145
There was Don Newcomb
and what that other guy used to steal bases, what his name?

00:25:14.145 --> 00:25:16.615
Jackie Robinson, all them old guys.

00:25:18.183 --> 00:25:22.287
And so that was our main game then
during that time – baseball.

00:25:22.287 --> 00:25:26.191
On a Saturday evening
we would have games up round the store.

00:25:26.191 --> 00:25:32.197
The store man be looking for them games
because he make a lot of money – kids buying pops and stuff.

00:25:33.098 --> 00:25:36.902
Like baseball, music also has a strong presence

00:25:36.902 --> 00:25:42.874
on plantations and Black farms –
particularly genres of blues and gospel.

00:25:43.174 --> 00:25:44.976
Black people always loved to sing.

00:25:44.976 --> 00:25:50.181
The Harris Brothers had a program,
10:15 every Sunday morning.

00:25:50.181 --> 00:25:52.918
It was in Clarksdale - WROX.

00:25:52.918 --> 00:25:56.821
We broadcast from the 50s to the early 70s.

00:25:56.821 --> 00:26:01.192
I hate to say it
but we was the best thing on WROX on Sunday mornings.

00:26:01.192 --> 00:26:04.863
We was invited to St Louis.
We did a couple of concerts in St Louis.

00:26:04.863 --> 00:26:06.631
We had those posters,

00:26:06.631 --> 00:26:11.703
you know, when the Harris Brothers was having a concert
– picture was on it and group was coming and so forth.

00:26:11.703 --> 00:26:16.341
When we went to Saint Louis,
it was a concert. The Bronner Brothers sponsored it.

00:26:16.341 --> 00:26:22.747
We would go to Memphis often,
you know, and Jackson and places like that very often.

00:26:22.981 --> 00:26:25.917
The group starting splitting up
when Rufus left and went to St Louis

00:26:25.917 --> 00:26:30.288
and Tommy left and went to Greenville
all looking for work.

00:26:30.288 --> 00:26:35.060
Daddy was a musician, you know, he taught music.
He sang four parts. He played piano.

00:26:35.060 --> 00:26:41.333
Daddy would try to start choirs and stuff
and the preachers fought against him

00:26:41.600 --> 00:26:44.302
so he had left it alone and he started working with us.

00:26:45.904 --> 00:26:49.307
But he could never get us
where he wanted us at

00:26:49.307 --> 00:26:53.511
because he wanted us to sing from the book.

00:26:53.511 --> 00:26:57.582
We wanted to sing like the quartets sang.

00:26:57.582 --> 00:27:02.253
Daddy called it hip slappin
you know they would sing and slap they hip to keep time.

00:27:02.253 --> 00:27:06.324
Daddy didn’t like that singing.
He said all that kind of singing is gonna come to a halt.

00:27:06.324 --> 00:27:09.594
But he said if you learn how to sing by music
then you could sing for the President.

00:27:09.594 --> 00:27:15.033
Daddy didn’t understand the change because like I said
he was mostly raised by this White family

00:27:15.033 --> 00:27:17.202
and they learned those kind of music.

00:27:17.202 --> 00:27:21.239
Now most of Negro music was by ear.

00:27:21.239 --> 00:27:26.578
Some of them learned to read music
and they became music teachers.

00:27:26.578 --> 00:27:33.151
But what he didn’t understand during that time
it was different cultures that was involved.

00:27:33.785 --> 00:27:37.689
Those books were mostly written by the White culture

00:27:37.689 --> 00:27:43.695
and they went by measure bars –
by spaces and measures of different notes.

00:27:43.962 --> 00:27:46.231
They didn’t suffer what we suffered.

00:27:46.231 --> 00:27:50.502
So the suffering that we suffered,
we had some songs that we could sing.

00:27:50.502 --> 00:27:57.942
We might not could write no notes to them,
but they told a story.

00:27:57.942 --> 00:28:02.781
This is what brought us through hard times.

00:28:02.781 --> 00:28:08.520
When we was going to the fields and we said that
oh I hear music in the air.

00:28:08.520 --> 00:28:10.455
There must be a God somewhere.

00:28:10.455 --> 00:28:12.290
Then when you work all day long

00:28:12.290 --> 00:28:18.897
then you coming home with but the holes on your shoulders,
saying if God don’t help me, I can’t stand to stomach it.

00:28:18.897 --> 00:28:21.633
These were the different songs that we would sing.

00:28:21.633 --> 00:28:25.837
And then when you get ready to get up in the morning
to go to the field ‘fore day in the morning,

00:28:25.837 --> 00:28:28.840
you could hear them singing it’s
another day’s journey, I’m so glad.

00:28:30.308 --> 00:28:37.082
This what those
Negro spirituals created from hard times.

00:28:37.082 --> 00:28:43.188
Opting for gospel over blues, it’s
no surprise the Harris household is deeply religious,

00:28:43.421 --> 00:28:49.060
a common thread across plantations,
like the one the Harrises live on in Perthshire.

00:28:49.060 --> 00:28:51.730
Mama made sure that we went to church.

00:28:51.730 --> 00:28:56.468
During that time the Black church was all the education
that Black peoples had.

00:28:56.468 --> 00:28:58.436
We didn’t have no school.

00:28:58.436 --> 00:29:00.805
And so we had to use the church house.

00:29:00.805 --> 00:29:06.978
On the White man’s place, he allowed you to get
a little education, but not enough to fight against him.

00:29:07.679 --> 00:29:12.784
Or else you know that he was doing us wrong. At first,
Daddy used to take us to church.

00:29:12.784 --> 00:29:14.853
We had a mule and wagon.

00:29:14.853 --> 00:29:19.891
And that’s
why we traveled for years until they begin to get cars.

00:29:19.891 --> 00:29:25.730
After church, the remaining hours are precious social
time for farm families working six days a week

00:29:25.730 --> 00:29:28.767
and it’s prime time for courting.

00:29:28.767 --> 00:29:34.139
I was about 16 years old.
Daddy’s car was a ‘54 Ford Victoria.

00:29:34.139 --> 00:29:38.443
This was the car
he gave me on the weekend that I could go courting in.

00:29:38.443 --> 00:29:44.182
If I was a good boy, I could get the car. If I did everything he said do, like he said do it, I could get the car.

00:29:45.183 --> 00:29:49.120
The only recreation that we had during the time

00:29:49.120 --> 00:29:51.823
was on a Sunday evening cause we worked

00:29:51.823 --> 00:29:55.326
just about all day Saturday til Saturday evening,
we had to get ready for Sunday.

00:29:55.326 --> 00:30:00.131
On a Sunday evening after church,
then that’s when the little young ladies,

00:30:00.131 --> 00:30:02.500
teenagers would walk down the dusty road.

00:30:02.500 --> 00:30:07.839
Wasn’t no gravel road, no concrete,
the road was dusty. But they still looked good.

00:30:07.839 --> 00:30:09.941
They was some good looking country girls.

00:30:09.941 --> 00:30:14.512
Didn’t many Black men had cars
during that time in the rural.

00:30:14.512 --> 00:30:19.818
And whensoever a young man or boy was courting
and had a car, he had the girls,

00:30:19.818 --> 00:30:23.054
because they didn’t want to ride bicycles.

00:30:23.054 --> 00:30:27.458
And that was the big thing going –
was bicycles or either walking.

00:30:27.458 --> 00:30:29.694
So I was fortunate enough to

00:30:29.694 --> 00:30:32.096
get Daddy’s car on the weekend.

00:30:32.096 --> 00:30:37.769
The girls would be walking the road playing,
and I stop and say, Do you want a ride?

00:30:37.769 --> 00:30:39.938
Yeah!

00:30:39.938 --> 00:30:42.407
We go to the store and we buy ice cream for them.

00:30:42.407 --> 00:30:44.943
Daddy give me a little change
to buy ice cream for the girls.

00:30:44.943 --> 00:30:49.047
And some was good looking,
some was pretty and some was ugly.

00:30:49.047 --> 00:30:51.049
But I made no exception.

00:30:51.049 --> 00:30:52.750
I treated them all the same.

00:30:52.750 --> 00:30:57.322
When Monday arrives,
the lighthearted atmosphere of the night before

00:30:57.322 --> 00:31:03.328
is a distant memory for farm families
as another week of hard labor awaits.

00:31:04.395 --> 00:31:08.066
Before the creation and enforcement of safety laws,

00:31:08.066 --> 00:31:12.704
harsh working conditions are the norm
for descendants of America’s enslaved.

00:31:12.704 --> 00:31:18.710
Dangerous jobs are openly referred to as Negro work
up until the 1960s,

00:31:18.776 --> 00:31:23.848
resulting in a higher rate of fatal work
injuries for Black Americans.

00:31:23.848 --> 00:31:29.821
In the off season, Black farmers
commonly work one of the most dangerous jobs in Mississippi.

00:31:30.054 --> 00:31:34.025
I wouldn’t no more than about 17 years old.

00:31:34.025 --> 00:31:41.866
And we had a bad crop year and Daddy needed me to go out
and look for work to kind of help the family.

00:31:41.866 --> 00:31:47.538
And there was a place over the levee of the
Mississippi River, called a levee camp.

00:31:47.972 --> 00:31:51.876
Levee camps are recorded to have existed for the purpose

00:31:51.876 --> 00:31:58.616
of building the Arkansas-Mississippi
Delta levee from 1880 to 1945.

00:31:58.783 --> 00:32:06.524
This interview confirms the camps still existed
into the 1950s for harvesting pulpwood.

00:32:07.125 --> 00:32:08.493
Daddy had talked about it

00:32:10.461 --> 00:32:13.131
many times before –

00:32:13.131 --> 00:32:19.137
how dangerous it was; how men would get killed
because you had to get on a boat,

00:32:19.237 --> 00:32:27.245
go across to the other side, and we was cutting over
on the Arkansas side, and you would be in those camps.

00:32:27.245 --> 00:32:31.883
They had some tents. Woods was all around you, animals
and everything else.

00:32:31.883 --> 00:32:41.793
Described as “slavery in 1933” by undercover NAACP
investigator Roy Wilkins, these levee camps are run

00:32:41.793 --> 00:32:48.933
by violent foremen on both sides of the lower Mississippi
River in levee camps between Memphis and Natchez.

00:32:49.467 --> 00:32:56.808
From 1931 to 1933, witness accounts of beatings
and whippings are uncovered

00:32:56.908 --> 00:33:02.947
by the Army Corps of Engineers,
The American Federation of Labor and the NAACP.

00:33:03.481 --> 00:33:04.983
Though beatings by white levee

00:33:04.983 --> 00:33:10.989
bosses have ceased by the time Henry takes his levee
camp work, the job is still quite dangerous.

00:33:11.055 --> 00:33:14.625
We was cutting pulpwood and hauling it.

00:33:14.625 --> 00:33:18.396
And so we had to work two weeks before we could come home.

00:33:18.396 --> 00:33:22.567
And didn’t care if you sick or what,
but they had a way to take you to the doctor.

00:33:22.567 --> 00:33:28.573
They would take you in a boat and take you across
over to Helena if you got hurt or anything like that.

00:33:29.040 --> 00:33:36.280
It’s before desegregation and these hospitals
will only admit Black patients under specific circumstances,

00:33:36.814 --> 00:33:39.183
like a voucher from a White employer.

00:33:39.784 --> 00:33:41.986
So they were paying us five dollars a cord.

00:33:43.388 --> 00:33:47.859
And the truck could hold two cords which is ten dollars.

00:33:47.859 --> 00:33:51.963
We made about five loads a day,
which that was 50 dollars a day.

00:33:51.963 --> 00:33:56.701
And within two weeks
it was about 250 dollars was our payroll.

00:33:56.701 --> 00:34:02.640
That was big money back then in the ‘50s because, you know,
we was only getting paid $2.50 and three dollars

00:34:02.640 --> 00:34:05.410
for working a whole day chopping cotton.

00:34:05.410 --> 00:34:10.948
While I was working one hot summer day, we was cutting logs.

00:34:10.948 --> 00:34:13.985
And we were using a double blade ax.

00:34:13.985 --> 00:34:17.055
And that both blades was sharp

00:34:17.055 --> 00:34:18.623
and I got hot.

00:34:18.623 --> 00:34:22.360
I got ready for some water
and water was at the other end of the tree.

00:34:22.360 --> 00:34:25.463
So I stick the ax in the tree

00:34:25.463 --> 00:34:34.705
and gonna walk by it and stumbled on a vine and the ax
just split my arm – blood poured out just like water.

00:34:35.606 --> 00:34:40.845
What happen it was two men,
White men, was working right across from me.

00:34:41.779 --> 00:34:44.182
And so when I hollered, they ran over.

00:34:44.182 --> 00:34:50.221
He tore his shirt up and tied a piece around
my wrist and a piece around my arm to cut the blood off.

00:34:51.322 --> 00:34:55.526
Put me in a boat and take me across to Helena

00:34:55.526 --> 00:34:57.195
to the hospital.

00:34:57.195 --> 00:35:04.368
In Henry’s case, his levee boss can get him the medical
treatment he needs even though it’s a Whites-only hospital.

00:35:05.303 --> 00:35:08.172
He put 15 stitches in my arm.

00:35:08.172 --> 00:35:14.178
The death rate in Mississippi for Black
people has always been the highest.

00:35:14.312 --> 00:35:20.551
And whether it’s for health reasons,
whether it’s for backbreaking work

00:35:20.551 --> 00:35:26.557
that Whites didn’t have to do,
whether it’s the prison industrial complex,

00:35:26.657 --> 00:35:34.632
work in turpentine fields, coal mines,
just backbreaking work building railroads.

00:35:35.566 --> 00:35:41.038
So after that happened, I came home about a couple of weeks
and then I went back.

00:35:41.038 --> 00:35:47.011
Despite the dangers, Henry will continue this job
until he is about 19 years old.

00:35:50.148 --> 00:35:56.053
By the 1950s, these grandchildren of the formerly enslaved
are now young adults

00:35:56.053 --> 00:36:02.026
and a generation looking for career opportunities
outside of farm work and dangerous labor.

00:36:02.026 --> 00:36:05.129
My brother, he was a teacher for a while.
My oldest brother.

00:36:05.129 --> 00:36:08.933
Now he made the eighth grade,
so he was supposed to been a good teacher.

00:36:08.933 --> 00:36:13.738
But he didn’t have patience with children.
He would cuss em, kick em, anything.

00:36:16.641 --> 00:36:21.913
So he kicked one boy and his Daddy showed up
with a double barreled shotgun to shoot him.

00:36:21.913 --> 00:36:27.318
And that was his brother in law he kicked – Flem
Bronner (laughs). He married at 16 years old.

00:36:27.318 --> 00:36:31.722
When they got married and we move here from Perthshire,
they moved with us.

00:36:31.722 --> 00:36:34.258
Him and Lucy had three kids then.

00:36:34.258 --> 00:36:37.695
So him being a mechanic, he wasn’t gone drive no tractor.

00:36:37.695 --> 00:36:42.300
Because he was a mechanic from a child up.
He started working out to Shelby.

00:36:42.300 --> 00:36:45.570
Then he decide to go to St. Louis,
because Uncle Charlie had him thinking that

00:36:45.570 --> 00:36:50.942
money growed on trees up there –
that it was candy mountains and all that kind of stuff.

00:36:50.942 --> 00:36:52.376
And he left looking for work.

00:36:52.376 --> 00:36:57.848
Johnny, along with more than 6 million Black
Americans, leaves the rural South

00:36:57.848 --> 00:37:00.451
during what is known as the Great Migration.

00:37:00.451 --> 00:37:06.691
Johnny’s plan is to move his family into a better life,
but with money tight in a big city like St. Louis,

00:37:06.958 --> 00:37:11.329
relocating the family becomes difficult.
So Lucy wanted to go where her husband was.

00:37:12.697 --> 00:37:14.432
And so she left here went were Johnny was.

00:37:14.432 --> 00:37:20.204
And their kids,
they all were raised up there at Daddy’s house.

00:37:20.204 --> 00:37:24.408
He enlarged his house.
Put some more room in that house to raise all these kids.

00:37:24.408 --> 00:37:32.850
I think that many African American people left the South
with no intention of ever coming back.

00:37:33.317 --> 00:37:36.954
They didn’t want to be here so
and they didn’t care about the land.

00:37:36.954 --> 00:37:40.858
After World War Two ended, a lot of changes occurred.

00:37:40.858 --> 00:37:49.400
As the country continued throughout the 20th century
and commercialization took place, rampant commercialization,

00:37:49.767 --> 00:37:57.675
Black kids saw things that they wanted and they wanted to be
like everybody else in the country that was not a farmer.

00:37:57.675 --> 00:38:02.346
And so farming became something of a stigma.

00:38:02.346 --> 00:38:07.952
It was stigmatized as something negative. A lot of Black
children did not want that life for themselves.

00:38:07.952 --> 00:38:12.623
They did not want to be farmers.
You can barely afford a house to even put on the land.

00:38:12.623 --> 00:38:17.595
And if you do have a house, oftentimes it’s
a chanty, it’s a shack.

00:38:17.595 --> 00:38:23.134
And so if you could get a job in the North,
you were going to leave the South

00:38:23.134 --> 00:38:25.469
and you were going to leave Black land behind.

00:38:25.469 --> 00:38:28.072
Despite this national Great Migration,

00:38:28.072 --> 00:38:33.778
all of John and Ella Mae’s
other children remain on John’s land through the 1960s.

00:38:33.778 --> 00:38:36.347
John and Ella Mae raise their youngest children in

00:38:36.347 --> 00:38:42.353
what is known as The Big House, as a new generation
is also being raised across the estate.

00:38:42.453 --> 00:38:43.754
While they raise Johnnie’s

00:38:43.754 --> 00:38:49.760
oldest three children, in The Big House, Lawrence
and his family live in a second house on John’s farmland.

00:38:50.161 --> 00:38:57.635
Additionally, John’s land ownership meant the advantage of
homeownership for skilled carpenters like John and his sons.

00:38:57.935 --> 00:39:01.839
During that time, Daddy
always tried to build us our own house when we got married.

00:39:01.839 --> 00:39:06.911
Everyone knows that if you have land, you have power.
If you have land, I could feed myself.

00:39:06.911 --> 00:39:13.217
And I do think that our ancestors looked at
that as the early stages of generational wealth.

00:39:13.217 --> 00:39:15.720
You know, we hear it now,
but they already had that in mind.

00:39:15.720 --> 00:39:17.722
They didn’t know to call it that necessarily.

00:39:17.722 --> 00:39:21.525
Houses are built for Minnie
Pearl, Willie Rufus and his family,

00:39:21.525 --> 00:39:27.665
Henry and his family, and Lawrence and his family,
with seven houses across the estate at one point.

00:39:28.299 --> 00:39:34.472
This new generation of Harris children would work
as farmers to family land - the first Harris generation

00:39:34.472 --> 00:39:36.440
to never have worked as sharecroppers.

00:39:37.775 --> 00:39:41.078
Henry would continue to
raise his family on John’s land

00:39:41.078 --> 00:39:44.882
while all other houses are abandoned by 1973.

00:39:45.116 --> 00:39:51.122
Henry’s grandchildren would be the last line of Harrises
to be raised on John’s farmland.

00:39:55.993 --> 00:40:01.232
While land provided dignity in life,
it would also provide dignity in death,

00:40:01.232 --> 00:40:05.403
through the establishment
of Black-owned cemeteries in a segregated South.

00:40:05.703 --> 00:40:12.109
These plots of land are the first decent burial options
for Black people – a symbol of freedom and loss.

00:40:12.910 --> 00:40:20.451
My brother Bennie, when we were about 15 or 16 years old,
he became a serious diabetic.

00:40:20.451 --> 00:40:25.022
He struggled with that for quite a while.

00:40:25.022 --> 00:40:30.094
My truck broke down, had a motor problem.

00:40:30.094 --> 00:40:33.431
The inserts had went bad.

00:40:33.431 --> 00:40:35.666
It was in the wintertime, snow was on the ground.

00:40:35.666 --> 00:40:38.068
He said I can fix that.

00:40:38.068 --> 00:40:41.071
But he got cold under there and caught TB.

00:40:41.071 --> 00:40:44.975
During that time with that disease,
you couldn’t be around no family member.

00:40:44.975 --> 00:40:48.112
You had to be quarantined from anybody.

00:40:48.112 --> 00:40:50.815
So some young men that had that disease

00:40:50.815 --> 00:40:56.253
had nobody to see about them, they put him in a house
somewhere on the backside of the plantation by themselves.

00:40:56.821 --> 00:40:59.256
And he wouldn’t have no water, no food.

00:40:59.256 --> 00:41:04.295
And one old lady who take chances went back to visit
the man back there and she would see at him.

00:41:04.295 --> 00:41:09.266
And so this kind of condition
it was during that time with that kind of disease.

00:41:09.266 --> 00:41:16.740
In the full grip of a tuberculosis infection, the symptoms
include bloody cough, fever, paleness and loss of weight.

00:41:17.608 --> 00:41:24.482
When Bennie is diagnosed in the 1950s, tuberculosis is
listed as the eighth leading cause of death in Mississippi.

00:41:25.149 --> 00:41:31.222
When you was on the boss man place, when we
needed a doctor, we would go to him.

00:41:31.856 --> 00:41:33.157
He’d give you a voucher.

00:41:33.157 --> 00:41:40.064
And then you could give a doctor that voucher
and he could see you and so you was on the boss man place.

00:41:40.264 --> 00:41:44.101
He took that out of whatsoever
he was going to give you at the end of the year.

00:41:44.101 --> 00:41:48.572
But it was blessed that he was able to get in the hospital.

00:41:49.440 --> 00:41:55.980
It was a nurse who would come to see about him
because he was a diabetic and she vouched for him

00:41:56.046 --> 00:42:02.920
to get him in the hospital because you know during that time
we were poor and we didn’t have no insurance.

00:42:02.920 --> 00:42:09.994
But they had this program where you could get hospitalized
even if you don’t have no insurance.

00:42:10.261 --> 00:42:12.496
And that hospital was down below Jackson.

00:42:12.496 --> 00:42:16.166
They called it Sanatorium. The TB hospital.

00:42:16.166 --> 00:42:22.239
With TB plaguing the nation in the early 1900s,
the Mississippi State Tuberculosis Sanatorium

00:42:22.239 --> 00:42:28.245
is opened in 1918 and begins
admitting Black patients in 1922.

00:42:28.312 --> 00:42:35.486
So he went down there in ‘56 and during that time
me and Charlie Mae was engaged.

00:42:36.020 --> 00:42:40.891
We got married at Christmas
and that January we went to visit Bennie.

00:42:42.760 --> 00:42:49.400
Bennie, he was a dreamer
and his dreams would come true.

00:42:49.400 --> 00:42:54.672
He could see things and that’s
the reason Daddy was crazy about him too.

00:42:54.672 --> 00:43:00.377
And he looked at us and he blessed us.

00:43:00.377 --> 00:43:06.383
He said yall gon be blessed.

00:43:06.917 --> 00:43:12.089
He said you’re gonna have a beautiful family.

00:43:12.089 --> 00:43:15.225
So we came back

00:43:15.225 --> 00:43:21.231
and we made one more trip
down there to see him before he passed.

00:43:21.332 --> 00:43:23.834
And he said, Mama, I had a dream.

00:43:23.834 --> 00:43:25.235
She said, what?

00:43:25.235 --> 00:43:28.973
I had a dream I came home

00:43:28.973 --> 00:43:31.575
but the lights went out before I made it to the house.

00:43:37.881 --> 00:43:39.750
And so Mama said, well

00:43:40.718 --> 00:43:46.323
you gone come home soon,

00:43:46.323 --> 00:43:57.468
but he was talking about, you’ll have to excuse me,
he was talking about the cemetery.

00:43:59.436 --> 00:44:05.876
Black persons in the United States continue to be affected
by TB at a greater rate compared to white persons.

00:44:05.876 --> 00:44:10.981
TB is currently one of the leading causes of human death
from a curable infection.

00:44:10.981 --> 00:44:16.654
In response, international Health
Organizations have pledged to eliminate TB by 2030.

00:44:20.190 --> 00:44:22.159
We were 21 years old

00:44:22.159 --> 00:44:28.165
when he passed away,
and when we got the call that he had passed

00:44:28.198 --> 00:44:30.367
we had no burial ground.

00:44:30.367 --> 00:44:36.373
And so Daddy and Mama was discussing
where they was gonna bury Bennie.

00:44:36.507 --> 00:44:39.376
And Daddy said, Well I’ll tell you what,

00:44:39.376 --> 00:44:43.080
I’m gonna put a cemetery up there side that road.

00:44:43.080 --> 00:44:46.417
I ain’t gon have no cemetery on the backside of the woods

00:44:46.417 --> 00:44:52.222
on the backside the place where White people
usually give Black people cemeteries

00:44:52.222 --> 00:44:53.457
on a ditch bank.

00:44:53.457 --> 00:44:55.225
He said, Naw I ain’t gon do that.

00:44:55.225 --> 00:44:58.162
Because it might be muddy,

00:44:58.162 --> 00:45:04.168
it might be rainy and said it’d be a problem
trying to get a body back there where ain’t no road at.

00:45:04.501 --> 00:45:08.439
We had never heard that before.
Not no Black person having a cemetery up front.

00:45:09.606 --> 00:45:13.644
I went down there when they picked up the body
I want to ride back there with it.

00:45:13.644 --> 00:45:16.980
I was back there where the casket sit at.

00:45:16.980 --> 00:45:20.951
It was two men up front
and I just sat back with him where the casket was.

00:45:20.951 --> 00:45:24.955
I said I brought him down there, I’m gone bring him back.

00:45:26.890 --> 00:45:29.927
He was the first one buried in the cemetery.

00:45:29.927 --> 00:45:33.931
It took a while for me to recover.

00:45:33.931 --> 00:45:41.538
When Bennie passes away in 1958, inequality still impacts
every area of existence for Black people in Mississippi,

00:45:41.739 --> 00:45:44.208
including decent burial options.

00:45:44.208 --> 00:45:49.980
By establishing a family cemetery on his land, family
burials will no longer be dictated

00:45:49.980 --> 00:45:55.986
by White landowners
and John can provide his son with a dignified burial.

00:45:58.822 --> 00:46:04.862
Charlie Mae, she was there for me when I lost my brother,
and that helped me out a whole lot.

00:46:05.162 --> 00:46:11.235
We married in ‘57 on a Christmas Day
and they say that’s a bad time of year to marry -

00:46:11.235 --> 00:46:13.403
that’s what old people used to say.

00:46:13.403 --> 00:46:18.008
Say you have it hard all your life.

00:46:18.008 --> 00:46:23.113
I don’t know if they knew what they was talking about
or not, but I didn’t have it too easy (laughs).

00:46:23.113 --> 00:46:26.150
She was a very intelligent young lady.

00:46:26.150 --> 00:46:29.553
I don’t know of her courting anybody else
besides me, she might have had.

00:46:29.553 --> 00:46:32.222
I don’t know, because I might have locked her down.

00:46:32.222 --> 00:46:35.793
I don’t know!

00:46:35.793 --> 00:46:40.597
She didn’t get a chance to get a high school diploma.

00:46:40.597 --> 00:46:43.100
Neither did I during that time.

00:46:43.100 --> 00:46:48.772
For Henry and Charlie Mae’s generation, it’s common
to have received no more than a fourth grade education

00:46:48.772 --> 00:46:54.778
before leaving school to work full time on family land,
or as day laborers in a nearby field.

00:46:55.445 --> 00:46:59.483
This would shape
Henry and Charlie Mae’s regard for education.

00:46:59.483 --> 00:47:05.622
I had made a covenant with myself that I wouldn’t
keep a child out of school,

00:47:05.622 --> 00:47:11.562
not none of mine during farming time
because my Daddy cheated us of education.

00:47:11.562 --> 00:47:15.766
And it’s sad when a child in the field,
the school bus is passing

00:47:15.766 --> 00:47:20.537
the field when you want to go to school
and people on the bus laughing at you.

00:47:20.537 --> 00:47:22.339
It’s really embarrassing.

00:47:22.339 --> 00:47:24.241
We suffered all of that.

00:47:24.241 --> 00:47:29.613
Daddy always said he could have been a lawyer,
he could have been a doctor.

00:47:29.613 --> 00:47:32.316
Or he could have been this and could have been that.

00:47:32.316 --> 00:47:38.422
So I felt like if my son would get an education,
they could be some of those things.

00:47:39.056 --> 00:47:40.457
We didn’t have opportunity

00:47:41.959 --> 00:47:47.130
to be educated like we wanted to because of our parents.

00:47:47.130 --> 00:47:53.136
They was uneducated men and they couldn’t see the future.

00:47:53.270 --> 00:47:57.040
And they thought that what they were doing

00:47:57.040 --> 00:47:59.610
was all that was necessary and that was farming.

00:47:59.610 --> 00:48:03.447
She didn’t like the life that her parents lived.

00:48:03.447 --> 00:48:07.818
And so she had to go across the grain

00:48:07.818 --> 00:48:10.621
to establish her life.

00:48:10.621 --> 00:48:14.858
So this where I learned

00:48:14.858 --> 00:48:20.597
that one person, a boy or a girl is a generation.

00:48:20.597 --> 00:48:26.603
If you can get one person on a track,
you can put a whole generation on track.

00:48:28.438 --> 00:48:34.411
And so after we decided we wanted to get married,
we started talking about our family.

00:48:35.012 --> 00:48:37.681
I said what kind of family you want?

00:48:37.681 --> 00:48:41.218
She said I want 10 children.

00:48:41.218 --> 00:48:44.922
I said sho nuff? She said I love a big family.
She said I want them to be educated.

00:48:44.922 --> 00:48:47.724
I said me too. I said other people’s

00:48:49.426 --> 00:48:54.932
children are professors, teachers, lawyers,
we can do the same thing.

00:48:54.932 --> 00:48:57.234
Said that’s the way we wanted our children to be.

00:48:57.234 --> 00:49:00.070
Said we was cheated out of education
but we can bring up a family educated.

00:49:00.070 --> 00:49:04.541
We decided that.

00:49:04.541 --> 00:49:10.547
Henry and Charlie Mae welcome
these eight children into the world between 1958 and 1971.

00:49:10.714 --> 00:49:16.553
Seven live to adulthood, each taking up various professions,
just as they imagined.

00:49:16.553 --> 00:49:22.559
Now a family of ten, Bennie’s dream for Henry has come true.

00:49:23.727 --> 00:49:30.133
As Henry begins to build a life for his family on his
father’s land, the family compound provides a head start.

00:49:30.534 --> 00:49:36.306
John builds Henry his wedding gift,
just as he’d done for his brothers who’d married before him.

00:49:36.306 --> 00:49:41.044
He had built Rufus a two room house
and then built me a two room house.

00:49:41.044 --> 00:49:43.613
Kids were jealous of yall because you had inside bath.

00:49:43.613 --> 00:49:50.020
When Rufus’ family start to growing then he was able
to move out to a larger house when he built himself.

00:49:50.187 --> 00:49:54.992
Throughout the 1960s, Henry’s siblings relocate near and far

00:49:54.992 --> 00:50:00.163
while Henry stays on the family land
and takes a shot at a career in farming.

00:50:00.297 --> 00:50:05.569
Mr. Pledger which was our neighbor farmer,
I learned how to farm under him.

00:50:05.569 --> 00:50:11.641
I learned the difference in good seeds
and and not so good and bad seeds.

00:50:11.641 --> 00:50:16.046
And so he showed me how to get a knife
and cut the seed in two

00:50:16.046 --> 00:50:20.484
and look at the moisture
and see it to see would try to see wasn’t no good.

00:50:20.484 --> 00:50:26.490
But if you get a seed that had moisture up
to about 80 or 90%, that’s a good crop.

00:50:26.790 --> 00:50:32.062
And so I learned that and I never missed a crop
when I started farming on my own.

00:50:32.062 --> 00:50:38.101
And he learned me how to prepare land and how to make sure
the seeds was in the soil and how deep to put it.

00:50:38.268 --> 00:50:40.871
He put his finger there
and said that finger for planting seed.

00:50:40.871 --> 00:50:44.241
He said that’s how deep you supposed to put the seed
– no deeper than that.

00:50:44.241 --> 00:50:50.180
And because you get that moisture too shallow the sun gon
draw the moisture out and too deep then it’ll

00:50:50.180 --> 00:50:53.083
smother it out, take too long to come up.
Sometimes it’ll rot before it come up.

00:50:54.618 --> 00:50:59.556
He was a man that, he really was real prejudiced,
but not to me.

00:50:59.556 --> 00:51:05.295
He always gave me credit. Said I was a smart
man. Gave me a lot of inspiration.

00:51:05.295 --> 00:51:09.466
When Daddy said I was ignorant and wasn’t gon be nothing,
he told me I was smart.

00:51:09.466 --> 00:51:12.302
So God always send you somebody to encourage you.

00:51:12.302 --> 00:51:20.877
When my brothers all went for jobs
and they left me here by myself.

00:51:20.877 --> 00:51:25.482
I could have left,
but I didn’t want to leave Daddy by himself.

00:51:25.482 --> 00:51:28.251
I never wanted to sass him.

00:51:28.251 --> 00:51:32.122
I would rather cry than talk back to him.

00:51:32.122 --> 00:51:36.359
And he he handled me real rough,
you know, I was a grown man.

00:51:36.359 --> 00:51:38.161
And never talked back to him.

00:51:38.161 --> 00:51:44.634
And I went try to and get from up under him
so I would go over to Pledger’s to try to work,

00:51:45.368 --> 00:51:51.374
because there wasn’t enough money here during the time
for me to even take care of my family like I wanted to.

00:51:51.708 --> 00:51:57.481
The federal government did not aid Black landowners
the way they aided white landowners.

00:51:57.481 --> 00:52:03.487
And so Blacks had to farm their own land
or they worked as day laborers picking cotton.

00:52:03.487 --> 00:52:07.891
And they also had to work an additional job
in addition to farming.

00:52:07.891 --> 00:52:14.998
And so that encouraged Blacks to leave the land
because you’re working your fingers to the bone

00:52:15.332 --> 00:52:16.833
and you don’t have anything.

00:52:18.602 --> 00:52:20.337
So one day Daddy cussed me.

00:52:20.337 --> 00:52:24.274
I was taking the town. Everybody was gone but me.

00:52:24.274 --> 00:52:26.676
And he would down to the house by hisself.

00:52:26.676 --> 00:52:29.779
And I said, Well, you done cussed be enough.

00:52:29.779 --> 00:52:33.016
I ain’t taking it no more and I cussed him back.

00:52:33.016 --> 00:52:36.586
And guess what? He started laughing. I had to stop the car.

00:52:36.586 --> 00:52:41.925
He almost fell out the car.
He said I thought I had crippled you.

00:52:41.925 --> 00:52:44.961
He said because I know you was raised by your mama

00:52:44.961 --> 00:52:50.300
and I didn’t know if you was gon be able to survive
in a White man’s world. That’s why I was hard on you.

00:52:50.300 --> 00:52:51.168
See I didn’t know.

00:52:51.168 --> 00:52:58.942
See a lot of times, parents does things for a reason
and we always take it for the wrong reason

00:52:58.942 --> 00:53:02.512
but sometimes it be something else
they be looking at in your life.

00:53:02.512 --> 00:53:05.215
Now he was trying to make me strong enough.

00:53:05.215 --> 00:53:13.456
When he found out I had some guts – as the old people say,
some balls – he just killed hisself laughing.

00:53:16.760 --> 00:53:22.766
Like most independent Black farmers,
a second job is needed to supplement the small farm income.

00:53:22.933 --> 00:53:27.337
For Henry, this means working in land grading
for Mr. Pledger’s farmland.

00:53:27.337 --> 00:53:30.707
Black men did a lot of professional work
but they got no credit for it.

00:53:30.707 --> 00:53:32.576
I was working for Pledger.

00:53:32.576 --> 00:53:33.677
A 40 acre block –

00:53:33.677 --> 00:53:39.449
I would grade it so you could start watering it at the top
and the water run all the way down to the end of the field.

00:53:39.449 --> 00:53:44.754
I had a tractor moving dirt with a dirt bucket
and I was able to spread that hill any way I wanted to.

00:53:44.754 --> 00:53:46.823
It would be level behind me

00:53:46.823 --> 00:53:52.829
and then I started to just push it on down
like sweeping dust until I got the whole field leveled.

00:53:52.929 --> 00:53:54.731
Nobody gave me that skill.

00:53:54.731 --> 00:53:57.734
And they would come out to inspect it
and it would be perfect.

00:53:57.734 --> 00:54:00.437
I had no training for that.

00:54:00.437 --> 00:54:04.741
This process is especially important
for irrigation and drainage.

00:54:04.741 --> 00:54:09.779
Day laborers like Henry are paid for their work,
but not much.

00:54:09.779 --> 00:54:13.550
Old man they call Preacher Ollie - that’s why

00:54:13.550 --> 00:54:21.057
I always has listen to old folks -
he gave me encouragement that there was a better life.

00:54:21.825 --> 00:54:25.228
He came by.
Had his little Bible in his hand.

00:54:25.228 --> 00:54:30.900
Going around selling books
and selling ointments and stuff.

00:54:30.900 --> 00:54:33.803
He said Mr. Harris you doing a good job.

00:54:33.803 --> 00:54:35.805
I felt so good.

00:54:35.805 --> 00:54:42.879
He said but have you ever thought that don’t care how good
you get you’re always be nothing but a tractor driver?

00:54:43.880 --> 00:54:48.051
I said no, sir I sure hadn’t thought about that.
He said that’s all you’d ever be.

00:54:48.051 --> 00:54:51.988
He said you too young a man to settle for this.

00:54:51.988 --> 00:54:55.925
Your family is growing and you need a steady job.

00:54:55.925 --> 00:54:59.262
This just a part time job– winter time, you can’t work.

00:54:59.262 --> 00:55:01.164
He said they got opportunities now.

00:55:01.164 --> 00:55:06.002
He said you can go back and finish your education
and get you an upgraded job.

00:55:06.002 --> 00:55:07.904
About 1 o’clock

00:55:07.904 --> 00:55:09.539
he just had told me that.

00:55:09.539 --> 00:55:15.312
And when he told me that
then I was like a fish in hot water.

00:55:15.312 --> 00:55:20.250
I just wasn’t pleased with what I was doing
no more. And I was enjoying it too.

00:55:20.250 --> 00:55:23.053
But when he opened my eyes, it’s
something about when your eyes be opened.

00:55:24.120 --> 00:55:28.325
So I made up my mind right then to quit.

00:55:28.325 --> 00:55:33.096
When the boss man came up a little before quitting time,
guess what he said?

00:55:33.096 --> 00:55:37.167
You doing a professional job –
the same thing the old man said.

00:55:37.167 --> 00:55:39.269
You doing a professional job.

00:55:39.269 --> 00:55:43.239
So I had to do like Daddy
did then. I had to figure out a way to leave him.

00:55:43.239 --> 00:55:46.242
So I had to ask him for something
I know he wasn’t gon give me.

00:55:46.242 --> 00:55:51.281
Henry asks for a 25 cent raise.
It would bring his pay to $1 an hour.

00:55:51.281 --> 00:55:55.785
He said, well I ain’t able to give you that raise. I said
well I understand.

00:55:55.785 --> 00:56:00.623
I said I know you got a family to see at like I have
but I got to do better. He said I can’t hinder you.

00:56:00.623 --> 00:56:04.527
I can’t get in your way. I parked that tractor, that was it.
I came to the house. Didn’t have

00:56:05.695 --> 00:56:06.429
no job.

00:56:06.429 --> 00:56:07.731
Didn’t know where I was gon work.

00:56:07.731 --> 00:56:12.302
I had three kids then. So Julius Christian
he was the little straw boss.

00:56:12.302 --> 00:56:16.373
He came by with the truck
blowing to pick me up in the morning.

00:56:16.373 --> 00:56:20.543
I said I ain’t going this morning.
How come? I said I done quit. He said what?

00:56:20.543 --> 00:56:21.778
What happened?

00:56:21.778 --> 00:56:24.981
I said well I asked the boss for a raise
and he wasn’t able to do it.

00:56:24.981 --> 00:56:30.220
And I just need more money and I just quit.

00:56:30.220 --> 00:56:37.360
He went and told the boss man what I said and the boss man
sent him right back, and gonna double what I asked for.

00:56:39.496 --> 00:56:44.267
And so Julius said you gone
be getting about just as much money as me now.

00:56:44.267 --> 00:56:51.107
I said well tell him I thank him so much but I know he got
a family to see at and don’t put himself in no strain.

00:56:51.107 --> 00:56:54.778
My mind was made up.

00:56:54.778 --> 00:56:58.915
When your mind made up it’s something else.
And you got faith too. And I left

00:56:59.883 --> 00:57:04.654
and when down to my auntie’s– Daddy’s sister, Aunt Julia.

00:57:04.654 --> 00:57:08.591
And she said, How your job going?

00:57:08.591 --> 00:57:10.727
I said well I quit my job.

00:57:10.727 --> 00:57:14.431
She said you quit your job? I said yes ma’am.

00:57:14.431 --> 00:57:15.732
She said why?

00:57:16.065 --> 00:57:21.504
I said, well it was just a farm job and it was part time.

00:57:22.305 --> 00:57:25.942
I borrow money from the man to make it through the winter
and then during the summer

00:57:25.942 --> 00:57:28.645
I had to try to pay him back and next winter
I have to borrow some more money.

00:57:28.645 --> 00:57:29.779
Couldn’t go to the doctor without a voucher.

00:57:29.779 --> 00:57:35.084
Had to go to him to ask him to give me a voucher
so I can take my child to the doctor.

00:57:35.084 --> 00:57:36.453
I didn’t like that life.

00:57:36.453 --> 00:57:39.923
And I said but I heard they was hiring at D&L in Cleveland.

00:57:39.923 --> 00:57:43.626
She said go, go right now. They’ll hire you. Go, go.

00:57:43.626 --> 00:57:44.294
I said I ain’t got no money.

00:57:44.294 --> 00:57:46.296
She said take this $10 and get you some gas.

00:57:46.296 --> 00:57:51.167
And that $10 fill my tank up
then because a gallon of gas wasn’t no more than 30 cents.

00:57:51.167 --> 00:57:54.971
She gave me that $10. I went down there at 12 o’clock.

00:57:56.306 --> 00:57:58.808
At 2 o’clock I was hired.

00:57:58.808 --> 00:58:04.614
It’s 1967 and Douglas and Lomason,
known as D&L, is one of the leading

00:58:04.614 --> 00:58:08.852
manufacturers of plated trim for carriages and automobiles.

00:58:08.852 --> 00:58:11.888
Henry is asked to start immediately.

00:58:11.888 --> 00:58:15.758
I said naw I can’t because my wife don’t even know. Said
I got to let my wife know.

00:58:15.758 --> 00:58:18.895
We didn’t have no phone then.

00:58:18.895 --> 00:58:21.564
I said but I can come tomorrow evening.

00:58:21.564 --> 00:58:25.902
He said ok. I came and told Charlie Mae about it.
We had a hallelujah time.

00:58:25.902 --> 00:58:32.642
I was getting 75 cents
and that job was paying $2.80 an hour.

00:58:32.942 --> 00:58:34.210
So this when my pay changed.

00:58:34.210 --> 00:58:38.748
That’s the reason I say when God got something for you baby,
keep the faith.

00:58:38.748 --> 00:58:43.286
He gone work it out. That’s
when we began to kind of improve our life.

00:58:46.823 --> 00:58:48.658
Industries was coming in

00:58:48.658 --> 00:58:55.698
and we had to be able to adapt from farming work
to industrious jobs like factories.

00:58:56.432 --> 00:59:00.436
They opened this school in Greenville Airbase
but they had them all across the state.

00:59:00.436 --> 00:59:07.143
They taught basic education to help underprivileged men
to do the math they needed to get those jobs.

00:59:07.410 --> 00:59:13.082
Shortly after Henry begins
working at Douglas and Lomason’s in 1967, he is laid off.

00:59:13.082 --> 00:59:16.619
After I got laid off, I went straight to the school.

00:59:16.619 --> 00:59:18.955
I went and applied, and I got on.

00:59:18.955 --> 00:59:25.628
I Having previously received no more than a fifth grade
education, Henry will finally get the education

00:59:25.628 --> 00:59:27.931
he needs to propel his family forward.

00:59:27.931 --> 00:59:33.703
I learned how to do math, I learned how to do decimals.
I learned how to do multiplying and dividing and so forth.

00:59:33.703 --> 00:59:36.039
I learned how to read this tape measure.

00:59:36.039 --> 00:59:41.010
After the 9 months the called me right back to work
and they had an upgraded job.

00:59:41.010 --> 00:59:45.148
You had to know how to read the tape.
I qualified. That’s how I got into Roll-Kraft.

00:59:45.148 --> 00:59:50.320
And I trained other men back there to read tape measure.
They called me Professor, baby (laughs).

00:59:54.390 --> 00:59:58.261
In 1972, John splits the acreage in half,

00:59:58.261 --> 01:00:02.298
selling 60 acres and
distributing the revenue among his children.

01:00:02.832 --> 01:00:08.638
He deeds the remaining 60 acres
to Henry to take over managing the farm.

01:00:08.638 --> 01:00:17.280
I stayed to keep the land because Daddy said that everybody
left from out here and they told him to go and sell it.

01:00:18.114 --> 01:00:22.719
So he said that I was the only one that said
I was going to keep it.

01:00:22.719 --> 01:00:24.887
And he said, I’m going to deed it to you.

01:00:24.887 --> 01:00:27.657
And so it wasn’t paid for during the time.

01:00:27.657 --> 01:00:35.064
But wasn’t too much owed on it, but trying to work
it is when I got so deep in debt, you know

01:00:35.064 --> 01:00:41.437
because we’d have a bad crop year and it cost just as much
to have a bad crop year as it does a good crop year.

01:00:42.271 --> 01:00:44.374
And so that was the struggle.

01:00:44.374 --> 01:00:53.282
Consider, a lot of Blacks did not want to remain on family
owned land because it was so hard to farm the land.

01:00:53.783 --> 01:00:58.221
White farmers’ crops
failed as much as Black farmers’ crops failed.

01:00:58.221 --> 01:01:06.062
But since White farms were much larger, banks
saw it as less of a risk to give loans to White farmers.

01:01:06.295 --> 01:01:11.467
With the income from the farm too unstable,
Henry must continue to work at D&L,

01:01:11.467 --> 01:01:14.070
to counter the debt anticipated from the farm.

01:01:16.406 --> 01:01:21.210
My first year I farmed, I had to farm with Daddy’s equipment

01:01:21.210 --> 01:01:24.280
and his equipment wouldn’t too good
because Daddy never did buy nothing new.

01:01:24.280 --> 01:01:28.551
That’s when I learned how to mechanic. Daddy
say he going to get a tractor and we shouting.

01:01:28.551 --> 01:01:34.290
And here he come pulling the tractor back on a trailer.
Henry, well, start to work on it.

01:01:34.290 --> 01:01:37.293
You can start it Monday morning,
we got to get it ready so we can carry it to the field.

01:01:37.293 --> 01:01:41.297
I learned how to be a real good tractor
mechanic on them old tractors.

01:01:41.297 --> 01:01:43.633
But that’s the kind of tools he had.

01:01:43.633 --> 01:01:49.238
So after the first year, FHA came through helping farmers.

01:01:49.238 --> 01:01:54.177
They came through letting farmers have enough money to farm
with and buy your equipment or whatsoever.

01:01:54.177 --> 01:01:58.047
So I went to FHA and I bought this 930 cage tractor.

01:01:59.282 --> 01:02:01.117
Bought a new disc.

01:02:01.117 --> 01:02:02.452
A pair of hippers.

01:02:02.452 --> 01:02:05.054
And that year I made an excellent crop.

01:02:05.054 --> 01:02:08.624
That was in 73. I made an excellent crop.

01:02:08.624 --> 01:02:15.832
At this time, Farmers Home Administration (FmHA),
established in 1935 following the Great Depression,

01:02:16.132 --> 01:02:19.602
is the credit agency
or agriculture and rural development,

01:02:19.602 --> 01:02:24.874
known today as a function
of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency.

01:02:24.874 --> 01:02:27.844
After that year it started to declining.

01:02:27.844 --> 01:02:34.684
It start to getting bad weather and so forth
and what hit the farmer so hard is whensovever

01:02:34.851 --> 01:02:38.821
you have a good crop
the next year you gon try to make a better crop.

01:02:38.821 --> 01:02:40.823
You put more money in.

01:02:40.823 --> 01:02:42.358
And supposed the bottom fall out.

01:02:42.358 --> 01:02:46.562
You don’t make nothing that year. Farming is a gamble.
They don’t like to say it but it is a gamble.

01:02:47.764 --> 01:02:49.398
It’s a gamble.

01:02:49.398 --> 01:02:52.435
What keep you gambling is because you feel like next you
you gon hit the jackpot.

01:02:52.435 --> 01:02:56.973
And it’s a sickness and

01:02:56.973 --> 01:03:03.212
you steady putting money into it and every year
and having a bad year so you get in debt over your head.

01:03:03.579 --> 01:03:05.748
And so that’s what happened to me.

01:03:05.748 --> 01:03:07.884
And it’s a lot of farmers, they lost, they just gave up.

01:03:07.884 --> 01:03:12.021
And FHA took that land back.

01:03:12.021 --> 01:03:17.460
And during that time I could get money from FHA,
as much as I needed during that time

01:03:17.460 --> 01:03:21.631
because they wasn’t planning on you paying it back.
They was gone take all this land is what they were doing.

01:03:21.631 --> 01:03:25.601
Government was taking it back. That’s what it was about.

01:03:25.601 --> 01:03:28.938
And when you was paying the note you wasn’t paying nothing
but interest. You wasn’t paying on no principal.

01:03:29.605 --> 01:03:32.675
And so that’s what Black people learned that was tricky.

01:03:32.675 --> 01:03:40.516
If you had a poor crop in one season, you didn’t produce
what you needed to produce to pay off a loan,

01:03:40.516 --> 01:03:43.719
then the banks could come and take that land away.

01:03:43.719 --> 01:03:50.193
And so that happened way more to Black farmers than it did
to White farmers because of the disparity in loans.

01:03:51.294 --> 01:03:58.000
Farmers Home Administration would later
become the subject of a 1997 class action lawsuit

01:03:58.167 --> 01:04:03.406
between Black farmers
and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

01:04:03.406 --> 01:04:09.545
When Henry takes over managing John’s land,
he immediately begins to modernize the Harris farm.

01:04:09.846 --> 01:04:13.983
It’s an approach that a mechanized cotton industry
now demands,

01:04:13.983 --> 01:04:19.989
but it also allows him to keep his promise
to never let the land interfere with his child’s education.

01:04:20.289 --> 01:04:24.327
My kids would chop cotton
but I didn’t keep them out to pick it.

01:04:24.327 --> 01:04:25.928
I bought some cotton pickers.

01:04:25.928 --> 01:04:31.934
I bought the big tractor and equipment and Daddy
said, my God, I didn’t know you was ever gon do that.

01:04:32.101 --> 01:04:34.570
I didn’t never saw this before. Don’t
nobody do this but White folks.

01:04:34.570 --> 01:04:38.341
Cotton pickers
and big tractors and equipment and stuff like that.

01:04:38.341 --> 01:04:42.678
So this White man had a one row cotton picker.

01:04:42.678 --> 01:04:44.313
He had went to two rows.

01:04:44.313 --> 01:04:47.350
He had it on sale for $1000.

01:04:47.350 --> 01:04:49.485
What would take Daddy a whole Fall

01:04:49.485 --> 01:04:54.724
to pick his crop out by hand, and within weeks
I done picked the crops out and had it all in the gin.

01:04:54.724 --> 01:05:00.263
So him and friend was sitting on the porch
and he said John that boy making a fool out of you farming.

01:05:00.263 --> 01:05:07.536
So I bought that cotton picker
we went out picking cotton out for neighbors.

01:05:08.004 --> 01:05:12.074
So you never know what a person can do
unless you give him a chance.

01:05:12.074 --> 01:05:14.076
That’s what the Black man needed – a chance.

01:05:14.076 --> 01:05:19.982
So Daddy didn’t know that I could do that.
He didn’t know none of us could do that.

01:05:19.982 --> 01:05:23.019
Daddy felt like couldn’t nobody farm the land but him.

01:05:23.019 --> 01:05:26.756
Lawrence came out to be one of the greatest farmers
there was on the riverside.

01:05:26.756 --> 01:05:30.192
He left here and went over on the Sunflower area.

01:05:31.861 --> 01:05:33.062
Cotton

01:05:33.062 --> 01:05:39.101
was up and down.

01:05:39.101 --> 01:05:44.874
So a good year, what you could do, you could pay your bill,
your mortgage, and clear a little money.

01:05:44.874 --> 01:05:46.609
You know, we used call it for Christmas.

01:05:46.609 --> 01:05:47.543
It wouldn’t be very much.

01:05:47.543 --> 01:05:53.783
You might clear five or $600 after you done
paid your bills that’s after you don’t worked hard all year.

01:05:54.817 --> 01:05:59.689
That’s why Lawanda used to say when she was a little girl,

01:05:59.689 --> 01:06:05.695
that “farming is a dog life.” That’s
why I didn’t want none of my sons to try to farm.

01:06:05.928 --> 01:06:12.601
So I was different from the older people
who wanted their sons to do what they were doing.

01:06:12.969 --> 01:06:16.439
But I always wanted my sons to do better.

01:06:16.439 --> 01:06:19.308
And I had enough sense to know farming wasn’t
nothing for them. Bennie would

01:06:21.377 --> 01:06:23.312
come from Mississippi State.

01:06:23.312 --> 01:06:29.852
And he came out there one hot day and I was out in the field
plowing some beans and it was full of vines.

01:06:31.020 --> 01:06:32.989
Bennie said this is some hard work.

01:06:32.989 --> 01:06:35.291
I said you better go to school (laughs).

01:06:36.659 --> 01:06:39.161
I worked at D&L

01:06:39.161 --> 01:06:41.964
to have insurance coverage for the family, but

01:06:41.964 --> 01:06:45.001
I worked that night at D&L and on the farm in the daytime.

01:06:45.001 --> 01:06:47.403
Before the health insurance through D&L,

01:06:47.403 --> 01:06:53.376
Henry could not afford medical care for his family
without a voucher from the landowner he’d worked for.

01:06:53.976 --> 01:06:59.982
But now as a full time factory worker, farmers
like Henry have insurance they would not otherwise have.

01:07:00.816 --> 01:07:06.822
It’s a health benefit the Harrises will unfortunately need
when a terrible tractor accident occurs.

01:07:06.956 --> 01:07:14.196
The health problems that follow would eventually claim
the life of one of Henry and Charlie Mae’s eight children.

01:07:16.532 --> 01:07:20.369
For a long time, Charlie Mae was against singing

01:07:20.369 --> 01:07:26.776
because me and Shirley was on our way to rehearsal
when Henry James had that tractor accident.

01:07:26.776 --> 01:07:32.148
After the rehearsal was over we was supposed to stop
by the store and pick up some packages.

01:07:32.148 --> 01:07:39.922
Daddy told Charlie Mae, say look, say
go on down there and see where Henry James at.

01:07:39.922 --> 01:07:43.292
Said little Henry supposed to be here by now. It’s dark.

01:07:43.292 --> 01:07:47.930
And her and D’Ella went down there.

01:07:47.930 --> 01:07:52.835
And when they called him, he answered.
And he was under the tractor.

01:07:52.835 --> 01:07:54.904
You know that was a tragedy.

01:07:54.904 --> 01:07:58.841
So she told the Christians,

01:07:58.841 --> 01:08:04.847
and then they picked her up and brought her out there
to the store where me and Shirley was buying groceries

01:08:04.880 --> 01:08:06.615
and we had just went on

01:08:06.615 --> 01:08:11.087
and left the basket of groceries sitting on the floor
and came on out here.

01:08:11.087 --> 01:08:15.057
He told them, he said, When Daddy come, he’ll get me out.

01:08:15.057 --> 01:08:16.992
And I did get him out.

01:08:16.992 --> 01:08:22.832
He believed in his Daddy.

01:08:22.832 --> 01:08:27.770
So the Christians they pitched in and helped real good.

01:08:27.770 --> 01:08:29.805
They had the doctors here.

01:08:29.805 --> 01:08:32.174
They had the wagon here.

01:08:32.174 --> 01:08:36.145
The ambulance here

01:08:36.145 --> 01:08:42.852
to take us to the hospital and they took him to the hospital
and they started working immediately on him that night

01:08:43.853 --> 01:08:49.892
because they had to replace a piece of his intestine
because a hole was punched

01:08:49.892 --> 01:08:51.760
and that tractor was spilling out into his body.

01:08:51.760 --> 01:08:53.762
It was gone cause a big problem.

01:08:53.762 --> 01:08:57.867
So Dr. Hollingsworth fixed that,

01:08:57.867 --> 01:08:59.668
that it would drain.

01:08:59.668 --> 01:09:04.707
So he recovered from that and he went back to school.

01:09:04.707 --> 01:09:09.145
That was about a couple years, that’s
when he came down with cancer.

01:09:09.145 --> 01:09:13.782
I don’t know if the cancer started from that
or if he already had it in his body. I don’t know.

01:09:15.484 --> 01:09:20.322
So after he took sick with cancer,
that was a tragedy in my life.

01:09:20.322 --> 01:09:26.795
And I suffered that for years, you know, trying to forgive myself,
which I was able to do it and with his help.

01:09:27.329 --> 01:09:32.067
He told me that it wasn’t my fault. That it just happened.
I said I shouldn’t have left you out there.

01:09:32.067 --> 01:09:36.539
We grieved over that for years before I could forgive myself

01:09:36.539 --> 01:09:42.211
because I felt like I should have left him with that tractor
at that age.

01:09:42.211 --> 01:09:47.049
And that’s
the reason Charlie Mae was against singing for a long time.

01:09:47.049 --> 01:09:50.686
She felt like if had been at the house that never
would have happened which it probably wouldn’t have.

01:09:50.686 --> 01:09:56.659
That’s the reason I didn’t bother the girls about singing
because she didn’t want me to do it

01:09:57.226 --> 01:10:00.863
because she felt that was the cause of her son getting hurt.

01:10:00.863 --> 01:10:06.969
Before she died she told me, I forgave you and I love you.

01:10:08.604 --> 01:10:17.746
Despite the tragic loss of Henry James, Charlie Mae, Henry
and their children live a happy life as a farm family.

01:10:17.746 --> 01:10:24.954
We had some hogs, some cows, chickens –
they wouldn’t eat no eggs off the yard.

01:10:24.954 --> 01:10:27.756
I could buy them out the store and they’d eat them

01:10:27.756 --> 01:10:31.126
but if I told them I got them from the
hen they wasn’t eating them eggs.

01:10:31.126 --> 01:10:39.101
They fall in love with the big. I kill the pig,
they cry. And didn’t want to eat the pig. They was a mess.

01:10:39.101 --> 01:10:45.107
When D&L closes in 1996, Henry continues to juggle
farming with a new career in carpentry.

01:10:45.641 --> 01:10:50.379
While his carpentry business becomes successful,
the farm still struggles to turn a profit.

01:10:51.680 --> 01:10:56.819
The farm, I owed $25,000 when I made it up to 2000.

01:10:56.819 --> 01:11:00.823
So that’s when the Black farmers Settlement came through.

01:11:00.823 --> 01:11:09.632
In 1997 and 1998, two class action lawsuits are filed
alleging racial discrimination in USDA farm loan programs.

01:11:10.099 --> 01:11:17.206
The two cases are consolidated and settled in 1999, known
as one of the largest civil rights settlements in history.

01:11:17.740 --> 01:11:23.812
The settlement would also require the USDA
to allow others to file claims by September 2000.

01:11:24.446 --> 01:11:27.483
Mr. Coleman - He said that

01:11:27.483 --> 01:11:32.121
they having the Black Farmers Settlement, and

01:11:32.121 --> 01:11:34.123
I’m going to go over there Mr. Harris.

01:11:34.123 --> 01:11:35.190
I’m going to take a van.

01:11:35.190 --> 01:11:36.825
You want to go with us?

01:11:36.825 --> 01:11:41.030
First, I said well I ain’t had no problem out of FHA.

01:11:41.030 --> 01:11:43.399
I said every time I ask for some money I got it.

01:11:43.399 --> 01:11:49.238
He said “if you Black, you had a problem,”
I said, Sir? He said if you Black you had a problem.

01:11:49.238 --> 01:11:51.106
I said I better go see.

01:11:51.106 --> 01:11:57.112
So me and Robert Christian, we trail him over there
and we went there and we heard this Black lawyer talk

01:11:57.746 --> 01:12:00.416
about how FHA did the Black farmer.

01:12:00.416 --> 01:12:04.687
You had a lot of discrimination
towards Black farmers and Black landowners.

01:12:04.687 --> 01:12:11.493
They wouldn’t give you the same credit, the same loan,
the same cost share programs that they gave the White farmers.

01:12:11.493 --> 01:12:14.363
They didn’t want you farming because they wanted your land.

01:12:14.363 --> 01:12:17.366
The disparity and the discrimination

01:12:17.366 --> 01:12:25.407
between Black farmers and White farmers
began in earnest in the 1920s and throughout the 1930s.

01:12:25.841 --> 01:12:33.549
The USDA, controlled the interest rates
and who would get loans from individual banks.

01:12:34.350 --> 01:12:41.256
And so if a bank did not want to give loans to Black farmers
because it was a higher risk –

01:12:41.256 --> 01:12:43.625
it’s very similar to redlining.

01:12:43.625 --> 01:12:50.132
We understand redlining and the disparity in loans for Black
farmers was very similar.

01:12:50.499 --> 01:12:53.068
In fact, redlining is probably based on that.

01:12:54.136 --> 01:12:58.474
The lawsuit argued violations of the Fifth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution,

01:12:58.474 --> 01:13:05.247
the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Title VI of
the Civil Rights Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

01:13:05.914 --> 01:13:09.051
If you didn’t know your rights
you didn’t know what in the world they was doing.

01:13:09.051 --> 01:13:13.021
When the White man borrow it, they give him all his money,
he put in the bank.

01:13:13.021 --> 01:13:16.325
Some of them draw interest off it,
made the money work for them.

01:13:16.325 --> 01:13:20.829
But they wouldn’t give us our money.
They kept it and we have to go to them and get vouchers.

01:13:20.829 --> 01:13:26.568
I need some fertilizer - how much fertilizer you need? And
they write the checks out. They wasn’t supposed to do that.

01:13:26.568 --> 01:13:32.274
I didn’t know that until the lawyer explained
that we were deprived of our civil rights.

01:13:32.274 --> 01:13:38.380
It was in 99 and in 2000 I got the $50,000.

01:13:39.481 --> 01:13:43.018
I paid the land off before Charlie Mae died.

01:13:43.018 --> 01:13:46.388
She said, Thank the Lord, the land is paid off.

01:13:46.388 --> 01:13:50.826
When I paid it off,
then I paid my little bills, and bought me a car.

01:13:50.826 --> 01:13:54.663
But I give God the credit, you know, because

01:13:54.663 --> 01:13:57.800
He helped me make some wise decisions. And Charlie Mae
she was good on making decisions.

01:13:57.800 --> 01:14:03.005
She tell you don’t do it. You better not do it.

01:14:03.005 --> 01:14:07.142
Though Henry received his settlement,
not all Black farmers were as fortunate.

01:14:07.142 --> 01:14:10.846
Many were denied or unable to access applications.

01:14:10.846 --> 01:14:12.181
To address this,

01:14:12.181 --> 01:14:19.555
additional rounds of applicants were accepted in 2008,
but many were still denied or unable to access applications.

01:14:20.022 --> 01:14:23.158
So you still had to be able to produce and prove

01:14:23.158 --> 01:14:27.629
you had to produce paperwork
to prove that you went into those offices and apply for this

01:14:27.629 --> 01:14:29.064
and I went to apply for that.

01:14:29.064 --> 01:14:32.701
There’s a lot of people who had everything that they needed,
and would go in certain offices,

01:14:32.701 --> 01:14:36.405
and they would say, That doesn’t exist
or we don’t know nothing about that.

01:14:36.405 --> 01:14:38.607
And so you have all these practices now here

01:14:38.607 --> 01:14:42.444
that are supposed to benefit people,
but you only give it to who you wanted to give it to.

01:14:42.444 --> 01:14:44.880
And so there’s a form they came out with.

01:14:44.880 --> 01:14:48.484
They didn’t have it back then, but they have it
now. It’s call a receipt of service.

01:14:48.484 --> 01:14:52.321
To bypass
any potential prejudice practices in the local offices,

01:14:52.321 --> 01:14:58.560
the USDA also announced loan forgiveness
in 2021 for impacted Black farmers.

01:14:59.061 --> 01:15:01.463
However, payouts were held up by

01:15:01.463 --> 01:15:07.469
about a dozen lawsuits from White farmers
claiming the program discriminated by excluding non-Blacks.

01:15:08.036 --> 01:15:16.645
A solution was crafted through the 2021 Inflation
Reduction Act, with a $2.1 billion historic payout in 2024.

01:15:17.246 --> 01:15:24.186
I’m amazed at our resilience,
our ability to still we rise.

01:15:24.186 --> 01:15:32.261
Honestly, I can’t think of anything
that was a successful initiative to help Black people.

01:15:32.261 --> 01:15:41.336
As much sweat equity that we have invested
with our blood, sweat, tears in the soils of this America,

01:15:41.637 --> 01:15:47.442
what should the return on that investment
be has not been satisfied, has not been fulfilled,

01:15:47.442 --> 01:15:49.244
has not been properly addressed.

01:15:50.946 --> 01:15:55.751
Despite the years of obstacles
for America’s independent Black farmers,

01:15:55.751 --> 01:15:59.054
John Harris’ land has remained in the Harris family

01:15:59.187 --> 01:16:05.160
for more than 70 years,
while more than 90% of Black farmland was lost.

01:16:05.561 --> 01:16:11.733
I don’t know what will happen
when and I ain’t looking that far.

01:16:12.434 --> 01:16:19.841
I’m just trying to carry my shift out
because I wanted to keep it

01:16:20.475 --> 01:16:26.481
and so I done did that, you know, and it’s paid off
and I don’t owe nothing on it.

01:16:27.282 --> 01:16:32.721
Today the land is owned by the Harris
Group, LLC, managed by Henry as the head member,

01:16:32.721 --> 01:16:35.457
with his children making up the membership.

01:16:35.457 --> 01:16:41.263
In 2019, Henry relocated to a nearby town
to be closer to his daughters.

01:16:41.263 --> 01:16:45.067
I can’t leave
no kind of burden on them to tell them to keep it.

01:16:45.067 --> 01:16:52.174
It’s up to them and whatsoever is comfortable with them,
they have to make a choice.

01:16:52.174 --> 01:17:01.950
Daddy did things that the other men didn’t do
and so yall did something that young men hadn’t did -

01:17:01.950 --> 01:17:03.285
that was the LLC.

01:17:03.285 --> 01:17:04.786
That was what White people thing.

01:17:04.786 --> 01:17:08.890
Black people always left heir property
and it was a messed up property.

01:17:08.890 --> 01:17:14.029
Because ain’t but one person gone see at it
but everybody want a piece of it.

01:17:14.029 --> 01:17:20.736
So it end up its gone grow up the house gone rot down
because ain’t nobody gone want to keep it up.

01:17:21.370 --> 01:17:27.542
But now with the LLC, that give everybody interest in it
and a little responsibility too.

01:17:28.477 --> 01:17:33.849
I believe that it was in the early 2000 after

01:17:33.849 --> 01:17:38.487
our mother died,
he started thinking about estate planning. I’m an attorney.

01:17:38.487 --> 01:17:45.060
And so my brother, Bennie recommended that my dad talk to me
and figure out the best vehicle.

01:17:45.193 --> 01:17:51.500
And so the LLC was a way to accomplish
what we wanted to, and that’s preserve

01:17:51.500 --> 01:17:55.170
and effectuate the operation of the farm.

01:17:55.170 --> 01:17:58.440
Fractionalization is something you want to try and avoid.

01:17:58.440 --> 01:18:00.809
So if you have a parcel of land, I guess

01:18:00.809 --> 01:18:07.582
in the most basic sense, if you have descendants,
you could just chop it up and give each person a piece.

01:18:07.582 --> 01:18:08.750
Right?

01:18:08.750 --> 01:18:13.622
But one person might have land that’s in the bottom
that’s not habitable.

01:18:13.622 --> 01:18:19.594
Some person might have a parcel in the middle that doesn’t
have good access to a road and things like that.

01:18:19.861 --> 01:18:25.567
And as you know, so it’s fractionalized and it’s
not very useful or marketable that way.

01:18:25.567 --> 01:18:28.036
An LLC is a way to

01:18:29.137 --> 01:18:31.573
preserve the land as one block

01:18:31.573 --> 01:18:37.946
that’s a lot more marketable and usable,
and the land is an asset that’s owned by the LLC.

01:18:37.946 --> 01:18:44.553
So the LLC can own property, it can hold assets,
and you just have an ownership interest

01:18:44.553 --> 01:18:51.526
in that legal entity, as opposed to the actual land,
and you can operate the business and and so forth.

01:18:52.194 --> 01:18:54.262
I ain’t got no retirement.

01:18:54.262 --> 01:19:01.403
The retirement I get ain’t but a hundred dollars a month
and so the land rent give me a retirement.

01:19:01.570 --> 01:19:08.910
You know that I won’t have to live on a strain you know get
behind on bills and calling and borrowing money and stuff.

01:19:09.277 --> 01:19:14.616
Retirement for John Harris
meant selling land – a scenario of Black land loss.

01:19:14.616 --> 01:19:19.287
But Henry turned to leasing to a commercial farmer
for his retirement plan.

01:19:19.287 --> 01:19:23.391
And that’s just one option.
There are a lot of different things you can do.

01:19:23.391 --> 01:19:25.694
You can keep your land and turn money over.

01:19:25.694 --> 01:19:27.395
I’m talking about things other than farming.

01:19:27.395 --> 01:19:32.400
If you’re a nonprofit, there’s a lot of different grant
funding and foundation money that you could go for.

01:19:32.400 --> 01:19:38.540
You might do a old fashioned dude ranch
where people come and ride horses, milk cow, just, camping

01:19:38.573 --> 01:19:41.376
and all that type of stuff.
But if you’re doing foundation, of course, it has to be

01:19:41.376 --> 01:19:43.545
something they’ll be getting from it,
some kind of education.

01:19:43.545 --> 01:19:48.183
My thing is to try to figure out a way to make money
and keep it. People love to sell.

01:19:48.183 --> 01:19:52.921
And they love to build a subdivision
because it’s quick money but once it’s gone, it’s gone.

01:19:52.921 --> 01:19:55.757
There’s nothing wrong with building things on it,
but just just keep it.

01:19:55.757 --> 01:19:58.293
So if you want to do, event spaces.

01:19:58.293 --> 01:20:04.099
We have a lot of Black land owners I know that
have built those spaces for people to have weddings.

01:20:04.099 --> 01:20:07.169
I know a few who have turned them into more

01:20:07.169 --> 01:20:12.574
of a recreational area hunting, fishing, camping,
you know, those type of things.

01:20:12.574 --> 01:20:18.180
You know, you see a lot of sunflower mazes,
corn mazes, different thing like that in the Fall.

01:20:18.180 --> 01:20:20.015
I know a couple of Black people that are doing that.

01:20:20.015 --> 01:20:23.485
That’s how they, you know, generate some money
during certain seasons.

01:20:23.485 --> 01:20:28.623
You have people who go in and they’ll just landscape
it beautifully and you come and take pictures.

01:20:28.623 --> 01:20:31.393
You pay to come in and take pictures.
You pay to come in there and sit.

01:20:31.393 --> 01:20:36.031
Now, of course you can sell it, like I said build
subdivisions, businesses and things of that nature.

01:20:36.031 --> 01:20:39.167
But keeping it, there’s a lot of things that you can do.

01:20:39.167 --> 01:20:43.572
But, but that’s the good thing about having land.
It can be multipurpose.

01:20:43.572 --> 01:20:45.040
It doesn’t just have to be farming.

01:20:45.040 --> 01:20:47.909
The Harris family's choice to deed the land

01:20:47.909 --> 01:20:53.882
to a business rather than continue as heirs
property, has protected the land from further loss.

01:20:54.049 --> 01:20:54.783
I think

01:20:56.218 --> 01:20:59.454
it’s important to understand that property ownership

01:20:59.454 --> 01:21:05.460
is just one part of the equation in order to have,
you know, to preserve and protect property.

01:21:05.460 --> 01:21:11.366
There are some legal instruments, legal vehicles
by which you can do that, that’s been around forever.

01:21:11.366 --> 01:21:17.439
And unfortunately, a lot of African American farmers
and folks lost their property because they didn’t have those

01:21:17.906 --> 01:21:20.642
legal, you know, instruments to help them protect it.

01:21:20.642 --> 01:21:28.316
The things that I see now how most of us lose land
is that we don’t have wills, we don’t have estate plans.

01:21:28.483 --> 01:21:34.756
An estate plan is simply a plan that lays out everything
to your children, it’s not just a will, it’s an actual plan.

01:21:35.190 --> 01:21:39.761
In this estate planning,
this lays out all the bills that have to be paid.

01:21:39.761 --> 01:21:44.199
It lays out all the tax information,
it lays out who you owe,

01:21:44.199 --> 01:21:50.005
and then it lays out a general operation on how
to keep these things going, how to keep this farm going.

01:21:50.005 --> 01:21:52.040
And it’s a step by step plan.

01:21:52.040 --> 01:21:58.413
And a lot of times we fail because we don’t have a plan
and we lose or we figure that all this is too hard.

01:21:58.413 --> 01:22:03.251
I don’t know how Dad did this and then the first person
that come up and wants to sell it, we sell it

01:22:03.251 --> 01:22:06.388
and then they live across the street
from the land that they sell.

01:22:06.388 --> 01:22:11.526
Now they got to look at that person
make millions of dollars off of it because they sold it for

01:22:12.928 --> 01:22:16.564
nothing, pretty much just enough to maybe get a car.

01:22:16.564 --> 01:22:18.867
Buying the land is one achievement.

01:22:18.867 --> 01:22:24.306
Keeping it long enough to build more than momentary
advantages, is a challenge that Black farmers

01:22:24.306 --> 01:22:27.575
have disproportionately faced due to discrimination.

01:22:27.575 --> 01:22:33.848
But Black farmers today can find more help than ever
before, for a more equitable chance at generational wealth.

01:22:34.215 --> 01:22:36.584
There is a lot of organizations that are geared

01:22:36.584 --> 01:22:40.922
towards the socially disadvantaged,
so many advocates out there that can help you.

01:22:40.922 --> 01:22:47.495
I can tell you several instances
where people sold their trees for 80% under what they got.

01:22:47.495 --> 01:22:53.501
But numbers sound good to people, but it’s not nearly
what you could have got if you had just reached out.

01:22:53.601 --> 01:22:59.674
John’s decision to sell 60 acres
meant selling 60 acres of wealth, but the family LLC

01:22:59.708 --> 01:23:05.714
holds on to the remaining 60 for opportunities
to further advance the next generations of Harrises.

01:23:06.281 --> 01:23:10.785
Through the 1866
law that prohibited Black land ownership,

01:23:10.785 --> 01:23:16.791
to the 2024 historic payout
following decades of discriminatory lending practices,

01:23:16.791 --> 01:23:22.163
the great great grandchildren of America’s
enslaved are returning to the land while some never left it.

01:23:23.298 --> 01:23:25.600
Once considered property themselves,

01:23:25.600 --> 01:23:31.606
Black Americans knew that property ownership
would be valuable, even if unaware of every benefit.

01:23:32.173 --> 01:23:42.183
In my opinion, I think more so than anything, it created
or instilled in us a sense of independence, self-reliance,

01:23:42.717 --> 01:23:48.990
you know, an understanding that you can do anything
you put your mind to, a can-do spirit,

01:23:48.990 --> 01:23:51.993
and this value of relying upon each other.

01:23:51.993 --> 01:23:56.097
You know, at the very end of the day,
we had that land there. We took care of it.

01:23:56.097 --> 01:23:57.632
It took care of us.

01:23:57.632 --> 01:24:03.571
And just this sense of responsibility
that if you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done.

01:24:03.571 --> 01:24:05.640
And has that helped me?

01:24:05.640 --> 01:24:06.841
It’s helped me.

01:24:06.841 --> 01:24:10.945
I think that’s been the legacy more or less, you know.