J. William Harris
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Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation
J. William Harris
Deep Souths tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coast. Though these regions initially shared the histories and populations we associate with the idea of a “Deep South”—all had economies based on slave plantation labor in 1860—their histories diverged sharply during the three generations after Reconstruction. Along the Georgia coast, thousands of former slaves became landowning peasant farmers and African Americans conserved traditions that had largely disappeared elsewhere. In the Georgia Piedmont, plantation agriculture revived with the use of black and white tenant labor, and the region became a Populist Party stronghold in the 1890s. In the Delta, still largely a wilderness in 1860, huge public works and land-clearing made possible the creation of cotton plantations on a scale unknown before the war. The Delta drew ! tens of thousands of black migrants who nurtured the growth of a radically new musical form, the blues. In cities…
