Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section25/Geo Burris

Geo Burris
Born	1905 South Carolina
Died	Unknown
Occupation	Sharecropper, Service Worker

Overview

Geo Burris was an African-American former sharecropper during the Great Depression. He was interviewed for the Federal Writers Project in August 1939, at 34 years old. [1]

Biography

Sharecropper on Sunday, Little Rock, Ark., October 1935. (3110588422) This picture is representative of Geo Burris's family, and not a direct article

Geo Burris was born in South Carolina in 1905. He grew up on a sharecropping farm with his parents and seven sisters. His family struggled to gain money as the landowner would often take a calf along with the rent payments. His father would take care of family finances making it difficult to be autonomous. He would stay on the sharecropping farm for most of his life, despite a short outing to explore other options. At his home farm, he and his father attempted to prevent their landowner from taking another calf. In response, the landowner made the family move out. They then would have to move from house to house as many places would be bought out as the family was finalizing their deal to stay there. Once the family did settle down, Burris's father gave the children a substantial amount of spending money. With that money, Burris bought moonshine and had a tryst with a woman named Jane. She would get pregnant and Burris would marry her, due to her father threatening his life. Jane and the child would later die in childbirth. The cost of Jane and the child's coffin would cause the family to get behind on rent payments, causing them to lose more livestock. Burris became distraught from this event, and begged his father to move the family yet again, so he would not have to live near the graves of his family. They then moved to York County, South Carolina. The family struggled to make money, causing them to lose their cow. Burris claimed that they needed the milk to keep their mother alive, but the landowner refused and she died. When the family continued to struggle, their father gave the landowner their two mules, and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina where he would die as well. They used their father's saved up money to bury him and set up in Charlotte. He would then work wherever he can get a job that'll get him meals. His last recorded job was in a boarding house with $3.00 an hour. He also would take care of his sister's son, George Washington, as many of his sisters became single mothers. Geo spent ten days in jail for possession of a firearm, that he was given by a stranger. His last recorded statement was "For now on, I'm looking after Geo." [2]

Social Issues

African Americans in the Sharecropping Industry

Sharecropper plowing loc

After the Civil War would make the Emancipation Proclamation free southern slaves, many black people would end up on sharecropping farms or becoming tenant farmers. Under the tenant farming system black people would be required to pay a rent to their landowner, who was often a white man who previously owned slaves. Sharecropping was the same thing, but the landowner was paid in crops instead. Due to this, many black people would face incredibly high debts that would limit their ability to be autonomous [3] They often ended up in these situations due to black sharecroppers and tenant farmers could not always read or comprehend labor contracts, as many black people could not receive an education, due to the Jim Crow laws. [4] Some black tenant farmers would migrate in between farms if the treatment was bad enough. This would be bad for business, leading some landowners to increase their use of debts and possible blacklisting. [5] Tenant farmers and sharecroppers would use the resources they did have to create connections in order to gain greater representation. "...black laborers appropriated hegemonic structures such as corporate plantation shipping and migration networks to circulate newspapers and spread ideas about labor activism and racial solidarity" [6]

Black People Working in Service

Palace-Hotel-black-workers-1882-from-Bonanza-Inn

Black people would struggle to find work in the South, after the Civil War and due to poor treatment, many would move to cities, particularly northern ones. There they would often work jobs in service, to avoid the manipulation they'd received in farms. [7] Although these jobs were often regarded as better, these people would still face discrimination. It would vary from reduced pay and menial labor, to no pay at all. [8] These people would still be required to have some kind of job by law, if they stayed in a Southern city. The black codes enacted after the Civil War in the south made "vagrancy" a crime, meaning black people had to work and have a permanent residence to stay out of jail. In 1877, these black codes would be replaced with the Jim Crow laws, which adopted many of the same rules. [9] The Jim Crow laws would be remembered for their enforcement of segregation. This meant that now, black people who worked in service would be separate from the facilities or the businesses of white people. The phrase "separate but equal" was meant to define the Jim Crow laws, but evidence often showed that non-white areas would be made inferior to the white areas. [10] When the Great Depression occurred, the NAACP would work to ensure that black people were not forgotten in the New Deal. The New Deal would place systems that were meant to help service workers, but these systems often left black people out. An example includes the "Blue-Eagle" agreement, a blanket agreement involving minimum-wage and maximum work hours. Many black workers were displaced because white employers would refuse to pay higher wages to black people. Black people also would not be able to benefit from growing power of workers' unions or the Social Security Act, due to both discriminating against them. [11]

Notes

1. The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library, The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library (UNC Universities Libraries), accessed February 7, 2020, https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/search/collection/03709/searchterm/folder_303!03709/field/contri!escri/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and/order/relatid/ad/asc/cosuppress/0)
2. Ibid
3. Katrina Quisumbing King et al., “Black Agrarianism: The Significance of African American Landownership in the Rural South,” Rural Sociology 83, no. 3 (2018): pp. 677-699, https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12208) (4)
4. Mcinnis, Jarvis C. “A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South.” American Literature 91, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 523–55. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7722116.
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. History.com Editors, “The Great Migration,” History.com (A&E Television Networks, March 4, 2010), https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration)
8. The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library, The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library (UNC Universities Libraries), accessed February 7, 2020, https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/search/collection/03709/searchterm/folder_303!03709/field/contri!escri/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and/order/relatid/ad/asc/cosuppress/0)
9. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Black Code,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., August 20, 2019), https://www.britannica.com/topic/black-code)
10. Melvin I. Urofsky, “Jim Crow Law,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., August 21, 2019), https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law)
11. Dona Cooper Hamilton, “The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and New Deal Reform Legislation: A Dual Agenda,” Social Service Review 68, no. 4 (December 1994): pp. 488-502, https://doi.org/10.1086/604080)

References

1. The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library. The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collection Library. UNC Universities Libraries. Accessed February 7, 2020. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/search/collection/03709/searchterm/folder_303!03709/field/contri!escri/mode/exact!exact/conn/and!and/order/relatid/ad/asc/cosuppress/0.
2. Hamilton, Dona Cooper. “The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and New Deal Reform Legislation: A Dual Agenda.” Social Service Review 68, no. 4 (December 1994): 488–502. https://doi.org/10.1086/604080.
3. History.com Editors. “The Great Migration.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, March 4, 2010. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration.
4. King, Katrina Quisumbing, Spencer D. Wood, Jess Gilbert, and Marilyn Sinkewicz. “Black Agrarianism: The Significance of African American Landownership in the Rural South.” Rural Sociology 83, no. 3 (2018): 677–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12208.
5. Mcinnis, Jarvis C. “A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South.” American Literature 91, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 523–55. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7722116.
6. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Black Code.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., August 20, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/topic/black-code.
7. Urofsky, Melvin I. “Jim Crow Law.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., August 21, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law.