Planting Hope on Worn-out Land
Publisher: NewSouth Books
ISBN: 1588382052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Book Description
The Great Depression of the 1930s contained misery for millions of Americans. Nowhere was the despair greater than in Macon County, Alabama, where hundreds of poor families lived on and worked land that had been eroded and depleted until it no longer supported crops. Ironically, this was once some of the deepest, richest soil in America-in the fabled Black Belt of Alabama, home to huge cotton plantations and thousands of slaves. After the Civil War, however, sharecropping and tenant farming impoverished former slaves and former slave owners alike, and decades of poor farming practices ruined the land.