African-American Gardens - Design and Development: Part 2
An oral history project, In Those Days - African-American Life Near the Savannah River, records that tenant farmers often exerted extra effort to keep their homes clean and neat. The Reverend Janie Hampton remembers her family cutting dogwood tree limbs and tying them together to make a brush broom. She and other children also helped collect white mud to whitewash their rented home.
That white clay, it was almost like lime. You just pull it back and it was so white. And you take and mix it with water, and it looked almost like milk. And the more clay you put in, the thicker it got. And then you could take that, and if it didn't rain too much, the house would be white. And if it rained, you just get some more.
And, she remembered, they...kept their yards clean, kept the grass cut back. [In reality] ...you didn't cut the grass back, you scraped it down to the ground. You scraped it with a hoe. That's what you call a clean yard. What I'm trying to say, [is] that was extra work that black people did to make it look pretty. And yet we were labeled as lazy. And it's no, no truth to that. People worked at night so that their place would be nice and presentable. Back in those days, they did that.
By 1910, nearly 50 years after the Civil War ended, 89 percent of all blacks remained in southern states, and nearly 80 percent of those lived in rural areas. But between 1915 and 1920, at least 500,000 blacks migrated north. Some estimates double that number to a million. Thousands more migrated west. There were a number of reasons for this exodus. Fundamentally, African-Americans migrated from the rural south to the industrial north in search of freedom, better lifestyles and better working conditions. As African Americans moved northward and settled in cities, they did not have space to grow food. The story of one family's empowering Great Migration experience is Essence - Exodus, Moving From South to North. It offers insight into the bridge between slavery and freedom for African Americans.
However, from the late 1800's onwards, the desire and struggle to own property was a dominant theme in the lives of the many African Americans who stayed in the rural south. This was an important step towards independence. How some achieved
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