Remembering North Carolina Tobacco

North Carolina's tobacco heritage comes to life in this volume of stories and remembrances from traditional tobacco farmers and cultivators. When early settlers struggled to grow anything at all in North Carolina's sandy soil, tobacco was a boon that became a way of life. The lives of many North Carolinians continue to revolve around the growth cycle of the tobacco plant, from laying-by to cropping and curing. In this collection of nostalgic memories, tobacco historian Bill Yeargin and others reminisce about the frustrations of slugs and tar, the cropping of dew-drenched leaves, the aching beauty of a tobacco bloom and the ultimate connection of man with earth—a connection that is slowly fading with each new generation.

The days when rural life revolved around tobacco planting and harvest are gone, but many fondly remember when North Carolina was the state of farming, planting and picking tobacco. In this book, historian Billy Yeargin takes readers back to the days when communities were founded and built upon tobacco culture, and when traditions developed as industries were born. Yeargin recounts the deeply intriguing influence of tobacco on the history and culture of the state.

Tobacco has left an indelible mark on the American South, shaping the land and culture throughout the twentieth-century. In the last few decades, advances in technology and shifts in labor and farming policy have altered the way of life for tobacco farmers: family farms have largely been replaced by large-scale operations dependent on hired labor, much of it from other shores. However, the mechanical harvester and the H-2A guestworker did not put an end to tobacco culture but rather sent it in new directions and accelerated the change that has always been part of the farmer’s life. In When Tobacco Was King, Evan Bennett examines the agriculture of the South’s original staple crop in the Old Bright Belt—a diverse region named after the unique bright, or flue-cured, tobacco variety it spawned. He traces the region’s history from Emancipation to the abandonment of federal crop controls in 2004 and highlights the transformations endured by blacks and whites, landowners and tenants, to show how tobacco farmers continued to find meaning and community in their work despite these drastic changes.

Burley tobacco revolutionized the industry in east Tennessee and western North Carolina. What started from two farmers planting white burley in Greeneville ignited an agricultural revolution and significantly changed crops, production and quality. By the 1990s, burley tobacco production int he region had drastically declined, and it is a tradition that few local farmers still practice.

Burley tobacco revolutionized the industry in east Tennessee and western North Carolina. What started from two farmers planting white burley in Greeneville ignited an agricultural revolution and significantly changed crops, production and quality. Burley transformed the tobacco industry with new cultivation techniques and a shift from dark and flue-cured tobacco. By the 1990s, burley tobacco production in the region had drastically declined, and it is a tradition that few local farmers still practice. Agricultural experts Billy Yeargin and Christopher Bickers take a nostalgic look at the historic rise of burley tobacco and its gradual decline.

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism—building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.

This book explores a profoundly negative narrative about legally segregated schools in the United States being "inherently inferior" compared to their white counterparts. However, there are overwhelmingly positive counter-memories of these schools as "good and valued" among former students, teachers, and community members. Using interview data with 44 former teachers in three North Carolina counties, college and university archival materials, and secondary historical sources, the author argues that "Jim Crow’s teachers" remember from hidden transcripts—latent reports of the social world created and lived in all-black schools and communities—which reveal hidden social relations and practices that were constructed away from powerful white educational authorities. The author concludes that the national memory of "inherently inferior" all-black schools does not tell the whole story about legally segregated education; the collective remembering of Jim Crow’s teachers reveal a critique of power and a fight for respectability that shaped teachers’ work in the Age of Segregation.

From the tobacco and cotton fields in North Carolina to working in middle management in a Fortune 500 company, Bales & Bolls chronicles E. J. Cash's journey to overcome the problems of her dysfunctional upbringing in the Jim Crow South of the forties and fifties. Struggling to survive the erratic behavior of her alcoholic father with his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality created fear, conflict, and confusion, as she grappled with his attempts to rape her, his voyeurism, and his brutal use of the belt. And her mother's silence strained their relationship, causing a breach difficult to overcome. Hers is a hard-fought journey breaking free from Jim Crow and its limitations from without and her father's lewdness and her mother's complicity from within. Then she stumbled into a relationship with God, beginning a spiritual journey leading to the discovery of God's transforming power of healing through repentance for the forgiveness of sins.