Citizenship, welfare rights and the politics of respectability in rural and urban Mississippi, 1900--1980

This dissertation explores African American engagement of social welfare politics in the Deep South. By utilizing a broad conceptualization of welfare that acknowledges the role of the plantation economy, the politics of race and caste and conceptions of respectability among poor farmers, this study challenges a more limited framework that locates social welfare politics primarily in an urban context. This study centers the experiences of rural African Americans in the development of the welfare state. In the early twentieth century, before the emergence of a formal welfare state, communal efforts at school building and encounters with farm extension and home demonstration programs constituted important aspects of African American efforts to strengthen or create alternative social welfare institutions. At the same time, planters and large corporate landowners successfully bent many federally funded farm programs to enhance the growth and profitability of their large-scale commercial farms. As the twentieth century progressed and northern migration increased, African American discussions about social welfare reflected their changing conceptions of the "country life" and the slowly emerging welfare state.; The New Deal generated welfare apparatus and the Civil Rights Movement provided the context for an increasingly militant demand for equitable social welfare policies culminating in the welfare rights movements of the 60s, and the later development of dynamic campaigns in the 70s and the early 80s. Mississippi's dynamic Welfare Rights Movement challenged traditional social relations, provided an effective critique of how poor African Americans were situated in the regional labor market and pushed the state to increase its obligations to its poor residents. Welfare rights groups in Mississippi engaged in sit-ins, public marches, picketing and daily encounters with caseworkers at the county level. Welfare rights activists recollections deepen our understanding of their engagement of the politics of respectability and push scholars to rethink conventional notions of political organizing.