THE NATION'S LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
November 10, 2017 - Vol. 1, Issue 10
WEEKLY FEATURE
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Labor Post-Emancipation: Reflections on Louisiana's Sugarcane Plantations
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Woman praying in a sugarcane field in St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana
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Reflecting upon his earliest memories of life on a southern homestead, physicist, engineer and HistoryMaker Robert Bragg describes the extraction of juice from harvested sugarcane:
“They had a mill which was a couple of stones, large stones that are juxtaposed. So, and they’re rolled, and the power for rolling these stones was a mule who went around in a circle. And he just sort of kept plodding around and rolling these stones and they would feed the stalks of cane into the stone and the drippings would collect in a barrel. And that was eventually fermented or distilled and made into sugar. And I can remember that you could chew this cane. It was rather sweet”
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[Robert Bragg, THMDA 1.2.6]
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Robert H. Zieger in
For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865
notes that
“In Louisiana, the postwar settlement left the sugarcane plantations in the hands of white owners, both small farmers who specialized in producing brown sugar and molasses and a group of ambitious planters eager to modernize sugar production so that they could tap into the burgeoning national market for refined white sugar.”
Often, this led to inhumane and unsafe working conditions for the predominantly African American workforce on these plantations, although Zieger argues that
“the distinctive circumstances of sugar production, along with the ability of African Americans to remain a potent force in Louisiana politics in the 1880s, gave those who planted, cultivated, cut, and processed the cane considerable ability to resist planters’ efforts to impose a more regimented and authoritarian work regime,”
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evidenced in protests in Louisiana by black workers which led to the racially-motivated Thibodaux massacre in 1887.
Archivist, museum director and HistoryMaker Harry Robinson, Jr. recalls growing up in Raceland, Louisiana, where his mother, Ruth Farlow Robinson, and her family worked on Godchaux’s sugar plantation in the 1940s:
“My mother’s folks, they drove the tractors with the sugarcane. Mother and them worked on that plantation cutting the sugarcane and then they had this big sugar mill…which was so clean you can eat off the floor ‘cause it was sugar”
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[Harry Robinson, Jr., THMDA 1.3.3]
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Robinson describes the labor intensive nature of the work, recalling,
“When we were young she worked in the sugarcane field and her mother worked with her—and my mother had a nervous breakdown when we were young and it was hard work out in the field, the pressure and what have you”
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[Harry Robinson, Jr., THMDA 1.1.7]
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According to Herbert C. Covey and Dwight Eisnach in
What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives, “Raising and harvesting sugar cane was dangerous and hard work. Cutting the cane stocks with sharp blades often resulted in accidental cuts that would become infected. Once cut, the sugar canes were crushed and refined into sugar.”
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Actor Harry J. Lennix also recalls the harsh working conditions of the sugarcane industry as relayed by his farmer paternal ancestors in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana:
“The sugarcane plantations were the most abhorrent, difficult, stressful, back-breaking of all the plantations. My mother, Lillian Vines Lennix, picked cotton. She was at one point capable of picking two hundred barrels of cotton--two hundred pounds of cotton, a day. And she told me yesterday, “If you could pick two hundred pounds of cotton, you could pick cotton anywhere.” And my mother’s not a large woman, you know. But even that was less troublesome than the sugarcane plantations. People were given to amputating parts of their bodies. Those plantations down there were lavish, in the French tradition, obviously, to some extent, and in the Spanish tradition--cheap labor and indentured servitude”
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[Harry J. Lennix, THMDA 1.1.5]
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In
Sugar,
Jewell Parker Rhodes observes that
“Reconstruction in America was a turbulent time. Some Southerners wanted slavery to continue; others adapted to a free labor source.”
And that in the post-Reconstruction era,
“labor shortages were common, as many African Americans migrated north and to other parts of the United States.”
For those African Americans that remained laborers in the southern sugarcane industry, Parker Rhodes notes that they were joined in the workforce by an influx of immigrants from China, the Caribbean, and Latin America who shared conditions such that they
“were at times treated as brutally as slaves.”
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Memories of Molasses:
A JOURNEY THROUGH SOUTHERN AFRICAN AMERICAN FOODWAYS
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From sorghum or sugarcane, into molasses--black gold. In
Beyond Grits and Gravy: Molasses-Colored Glasses: WPA and Sundry Sources on Molasses and Southern Foodways,
Frederick Douglass Opie places molasses in the context of the African American experience:
“Molasses is made from sugar cane and the similar sorghum syrup comes from sweet sorghum grass. Both crops were probably introduced to the New World during the Atlantic slave trade. Travel accounts tell us that West Africans were familiar with both because women merchants made and sold sweets from these plants”
and that
“it served as a baking ingredient, condiment, and cold remedy, and it was central to special-occasion meals in the South.”
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Molasses in particular gained cultural and historical relevancy in African American foodways, in that
“slaves were sometimes granted salted meat and molasses to sustain them through especially labor intensive tasks,”
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writes Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker in the
Encyclopedia of African American History.
While exploring the nuances of African American labor in sugarcane and sorghum fields in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras in the South, memories of molasses stir nostalgia in the archive. Public relations executive and HistoryMaker
Barbara Heineback
recalls the southern foodway traditions of her family in rural Georgia:
“Everyone came to grandmother’s house on the farm…And then when we got up Thanksgiving morning on the farm they had a couple of mules, which you seldom see today. And Grandma Annie was known for her syrup. Grandma Annie’s syrup. And if I can find one, there might be one jar left where I can take a picture in the barn that says Aunt Dolly’s Syrup. In the beginning they called it Aunt Annie’s Syrup. And then it got changed, everyone at some point, I’m not sure why, started calling grandma, Aunt Dolly. And her syrup was labeled Aunt Dolly. So it was a big white vertical label that says Aunt Dolly’s Syrup in red letters. And so it was molasses made from sugar cane. And it was her own recipe and there were two big black cauldron pots. And this was cooked outdoors. All the children were able to get on the back of a wagon. Dad would hook the wagon up to the tractor and we’d go out and we’d pull all of the sugar cane from the sugar field. And all the children got to pick some--the men had already picked most of it the night before, but we got to do our little bit, you know I’d say four or five in. And then we’d bring the wagon back to the yard where the cauldron pots--well first it had to come through a press and there was this cane press where you--everybody gets to keep walking in circles and putting stalks of cane into this shoot. And it presses the syrup out of the sugar cane. And all of the syrup drips into these cauldron pots and the stalk gets tossed. It gets cooked for hours and hours and while it’s cooking, the two mules are hooked up to go around this processor and--I mean this goes on for hours and hours and hours, cooking this syrup down until it’s prepared”
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[Barbara Heineback, THMDA 1.1.7]
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NEW CONTENT IN
THE HISTORYMAKERS DIGITAL ARCHIVE
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This week,
15
new interviews were added to The HistoryMakers Digital Archive:
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EDUCATION & LIBRARY/ARCHIVES
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Lauranita Dugas
City education administrator and teacher Lauranita Dugas (1926 - 2015 ) was a former educational consultant for the Child Development Associate Training Project at Harold Washington College and teacher with the Chicago Child Care Society.
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Christopher R. Reed
History professor Christopher R. Reed (1942 - ) was a professor of history at Roosevelt University. Reed’s books include 'The Chicago NAACP and The Rise of Black Professional Leadership'; 'All the World is Here!: the Black presence in the White City'; 'Black Chicago’s First Century: 1833 – 1900' and 'History of the Chicago Urban League.'
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Andrea Zopp
Trial lawyer and nonprofit administrator Andrea Zopp (1957 - ) is president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League and has served as vice president and general counsel of Sears Roebuck and Company.
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The Honorable Ivan Lemelle
Federal district court judge The Honorable Ivan Lemelle (1950 - ) served as the U.S. Magistrate to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana for over a decade, and in 1998, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana.
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BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
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Robert R. Lavelle
Banker and real estate agent Robert R. Lavelle (1915 - 2010 ) was the owner and operator of Lavelle Real Estate and Dwelling House Savings and Loan.
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Carole Brown
Investment banker and investment executive Carole Brown (1964 - ) was the chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority and a managing director of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
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Dr. William Finlayson
Bank chairman and obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. William Finlayson (1924 - ) established his own private practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1958, going on to found the first black-owned bank in Milwaukee, North Milwaukee State Bank.
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Michelle L. Collins
Corporate financial consultant and investment chief executive Michelle L. Collins (1960 - ) co-founded a successful private equity firm, Svoboda, Collins, L.L.C., and served as managing director of the firm from 1998 to 2006.
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Evie Garrett Dennis
City education administrator and olympics executive Evie Garrett Dennis (1924 - ) was the first woman and first person of color to serve as the vice president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. She was also the first woman and first African American superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, where she was instrumental in the desegregation process.
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Myrtis Dightman
Bull rider and Myrtis Dightman (1935 - ) was a seven-time qualifier for the National Finals Rodeo and the third African American inductee to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
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Rey Ramsey
Nonprofit chief executive Rey Ramsey (1960 - ) was the co-founder and CEO of the One Economy Corporation, which worked internationally to bring internet resources to low-income communities. He held leadership positions in Enterprise Community Partners and Habitat for Humanity. He also served as Oregon's Director of Housing and Community Services.
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Donald Carpenter
Social worker and sociology professor Donald Carpenter (1943 - ) served as the chair of the Department of Social Work and Gerontology at Weber State University. He was also the administrator and Head Start director of the Ogden-Weber Community Action Partnership, Inc.
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George L. Miles, Jr.
Broadcast executive George L. Miles, Jr. (1941 - ) was the president and CEO of WQED Multimedia, a public broadcasting media company which encompasses WQED-TV, WQEX-TV, WQED-FM and PITTSBURGH magazine.
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Theresa Fambro Hooks
Newspaper columnist Theresa Fambro Hooks (1935 - 2016 ) was a longtime society journalist at the Chicago Defender where she maintained a popular column, 'Teesee's Town.'
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Malcolm-Jamal Warner
Television actor and television director Malcolm-Jamal Warner (1970 - ) was best known for his role as Theodore Huxtable on "The Cosby Show," which earned him a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award. His other television and film credits included, "The Father Clements Story," "The Tuskegee Airmen," "Drop Zone" and "Malcolm & Eddie." Warner was also a spoken word artist and musician with his group Miles Long.
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2. Robert Bragg (The HistoryMakers A2011.003), interviewed by Larry Crowe, March 11, 2011, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 6, Robert Bragg shares his early childhood memories, part 1
3. Robert H. Zieger,
For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865.
University Press of Kentucky, February 10, 2014.
4. Harry Robinson, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2006.089), interviewed by Denise Gines, May 4, 2006, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 3, Harry Robinson, Jr. remembers Godchaux's sugar plantation
5. Harry Robinson, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2006.089), interviewed by Denise Gines, May 4, 2006, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 7, Harry Robinson, Jr. describes his mother's occupations
6. Herbert C. Covey, Dwight Eisnach,
What the Slaves Ate: Recollections of African American Foods and Foodways from the Slave Narratives.
ABC-CLIO, 2009.
7. Harry J. Lennix (The HistoryMakers A2006.057), interviewed by Paul Brock, April 1, 2006, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 5, Harry J. Lennix describes his family's background working on plantations
8. Jewell Parker Rhodes,
Sugar.
Little Brown Books for Young Readers, May 7, 2013.
11. Frederick Douglass Opie,
Beyond Grits and Gravy: Molasses-Colored Glasses: WPA and Sundry Sources on Molasses and Southern Foodways
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12. Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker,
Encyclopedia of African American History.
ABC-CLIO
13. Barbara Heineback (The HistoryMakers A2005.181), interviewed by Jodi Merriday, August 2, 2005, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 7, Barbara Heineback recalls holidays with her family in Georgia
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