"The Keynote of the Black Belt:" Debt and Social Control after Reconstruction

• In Event: The Racial State

Abstract

In the wake of the Civil War, with a decimated credit system, Southern planters and their allies passed, in each state, a law “for the encouragement of agriculture” (Woodward et al. 1997; Woodman 1995) Across the South, these laws created crop liens as a way of promoting the rebuilding of the South Agricultural economy through credit. Merchants and landlords would extend credit to small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers in exchange for a lien– a legal claim on future crops and profits come harvest. Sociologists and other social scientists have done essential work detailing the role credit played in the rebuilding of the south and the development of our contemporary political economy (Du Bois 2007; Prasad 2012; Muller and Schrage 2021; Raper 2005; Wiener 1981). Nonetheless, many of these accounts focus on credit distribution as opposed to debt enforcement. As a result, the various institutions and actors–local courts, justices of the peace, and sheriffs– that allow enforcement to occur remain largely underdeveloped and undertheorized. Moreover, many of the kinds of credit available for newly emancipated Black Southerners like local merchant or landlord credit remain outside of a systematic accounting. While the story of federal government and its push to development mortgage and bankruptcy relief largely for white yeoman is indispensable in accounting for our contemporary systems of homeownership and debt relief, the story of smaller debts incurred by disproportionately by people of color and aimed at covering expense rather than building wealth remain largely occluded (Sanders 1999; Thurston 2025; Quinn 2019; Prasad 2012). This paper is largely inspired by an observation made by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folks that debt is "the keynote of the black belt." This paper is a first attempt at detailing the development of debt enforcement laws. In so doing, I aim to articulate the ways particular forms of enforcement engender specific kinds of credit and shape the political and economic landscape of the South post-reconstruction.

Author

• Sofia Butnaru, University of Chicago