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Object Description
Interview no. | U-0932 |
Restrictions | No restrictions. Open to research. |
Project | U.19. Long Civil Rights Movement: Breaking New Ground |
Project description | Interviews, 2011-2012, conducted for the Breaking New Ground: A History of American Farm Owners Since the Civil War project. This project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and was coordinated by Adrienne Petty (of the City College of New York) and Mark Schultz (of Lewis University in Illinois) with assistance from Jacquelyn Hall. Interviews were conducted by two cohorts of research fellows and centered on African American farmers', landowners', and descendants' political, social, and economic experiences in the American South from the Civil War onward. |
Date | 6 June 2012 |
Interviewee | Rowe, James, 1937- |
Interviewee occupation |
Farmers Factory workers |
Interviewee DOB | 1937 |
Interviewee ethnicity | African Americans |
Interviewer | Randolph, Justin. |
Abstract | This interview dealt with the accepted family history and life experiences of James Rowe, a semi-retired farm owner in Monroe County, Mississippi. Topics discussed include: Rowe's birth in Gibson, Chickasaw County, his marriage and children, his early education at two country Rosenwald schools, finishing school at Vine Street High School, his fulltime work on the family farm from roughly age ten to 1965, his supplemental public work in nearby West Point, and a brief genealogy. In the way of storytelling, Rowe recalled: visiting the Mississippi Delta with his horse-trading grandfather, the racism encountered there, the way his grandfather (Robert Rowe) and great uncle (James Rowe) acquired their family's farmland, the peculiar case of James Rowe working in Memphis, a past knowledge of Amish land ownership in East Mississippi, and the plight of sharecroppers in the area. In terms of farm life, Rowe described: life on his elders' land and his own farm, crops grown, the growth of soybeans, his father's operation of a cotton gin on the family land, and the family's history of dealing with banks. In terms of recreation (and joined by his wife, Betty Gibson Rowe), he mentioned: church life, his father's role as deacon, a trend of landowners serving as deacon in his own church, the existence of alcohol in the community, rural law enforcement, and the trend of migration off of the land. |
Citation | Interview with James Rowe by Justin Randolph, 6 June 2012 U-0932, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
Description
Interview no. | U0932_Audio |