| Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi Subjects: Agriculture Cooperative -- Mississippi; Collective farms -- Mississippi; Delta Cooperative Farm (Miss.); Providence Plantation (Miss.); Sharecropping -- Mississippi; Rural development -- Mississippi; Christian socialism -- Mississippi; Mississippi -- Rac; This is the first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm (1936-42) and its descendant, Providence Farm (1938-56). The two intentional communities drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor. In the winter of 1936, two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families settled on some two thousand acres in the rural Mississippi Delta, one of the most insular and oppressive regions in the nation. Thus began a twenty-year experiment--across two communities--in interracialism, Christian socialism, cooperative farming, and civil and economic activism. ROBERT HUNT FERGUSON is an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University. His work has been published in Arkansas Review , Arkansas Historical Quarterly , Journal of Southern History , Southern Cultures , and North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times , Volume 1 (Georgia). |