The Farm Tenant’s Child The white farm tenants in North Carolina number 63,000 families of 300,000 souls. Which is nearly one-fifth of the entire white population of the state.
Almost exactly one-fourth of these white tenant families are croppers—a type of farm tenant almost unknown outside the South.
These white cropper households in North Carolina contain 28,000 bright-faced children of school age, and they are being hardened day by day by the conditions in hopeless homes.
It may be that little can be done for the grown-ups in these poverty-stricken homes, but surely much can be done for their children.
What can be done for them is a problem for teachers and preachers, Sunday-school teachers and superintendents, home and farm demonstration agents, state university and state college extension services. Here is the most insistent home-mission problem in this state and the South. The cry of the children of the cropper cannot go unheard in North Carolina.
Twin-Born Social Ills
White illiteracy and farm tenancy are twins at birth and boon companions throughout life. Tenancy breeds illiteracy as in the cotton-tobacco counties, and illiteracy breeds tenancy as in the foothill and mountain counties where the ownership of farms was almost universal in the earlier days.
As long as we have farm tenancy we shall have illiteracy. Neither can be cured without curing the other. Together they spell farm poverty, and farm poverty menaces the country church and the country school, country community enterprise and commonwealth progress as a whole. Ninety percent of the white illiteracy of North Carolina is in our country regions. Of the 105,000 white illiterates of the state only 10,000 are in our towns and cities. White illiteracy is almost entirely a country problem, and it cannot be cured by schools alone, of any grade or type. Its cure lies in (1) the better country schools, (2) in re-directed country churches, and at the same time (3) in better chances to rise into farm ownership—these three together. Apart they will fail. Under the best circumstances, the cure of farm illiteracy, farm tenancy, and farm poverty is a complicated, difficult social problem, and it calls for well directed effort throughout long years. It was so in Denmark and it will e so in North Carolina.
Twin-Born Social Ills
And if only we can hear the feeble cry of the 28,000 children in the white cropper homes of North Carolina, we will set ourselves to the task of jacking-up the bottommost levels of life in this state, with the same fervor that we give to the same problem in Korea and China and the far-away lands of the East.
No man in America has heard the cry of country children with any keener sympathy than Mr. Charles E. Gibbons, the rural research worker of the National Child Labor Committee. His studies have taken him into the country regions of Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Kansas and Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina in recent years. And no man better knows that child labor is not mainly a city problem or a factory problem, North or South, but that it is mainly a farm problem, the bulk of it considered—a problem of the beet fields of the West, the cranberry bogs of the North and East, the cotton fields and tobacco patches of the South, and the trucking areas everywhere; that farm children are an economic asset and in tenant homes an economic necessity; that the children in cropper homes must work if they would live, no matter how little they go to school; and that the tenant child in the South and the street rat in the cities of the North and East are the largest and most difficult of all the problems of child labor. His chapter on Child Labor on Farms, in Rural Child Welfare, is the very best chapter on this subject in print. This chapter and this book ought to be read by every man and woman of heart in North Carolina. The Farmer's Friend: Gibbons in Carolina
When the State Farm Tenancy Commission settled down to the critical task of determining in detail the field schedules of its three county surveys in 1922, Mr. Gibbons was called in as an expert by the State University. He rendered valuable service in perfecting the schedules so as to yield the data that gave heightened social significance to the University bulletin on How Farm Tenants Live in Mid-State Carolina.
He gave a month or more to the task of making field schedules, exploring the field to be surveyed by the University representative, and in schooling Mr. Dickey the surveyor. He gave his time and genius to this work without a cent of extra compensation, and for this superb service he was released to us by the National Child Labor Commission without cost to the university and the state. It was fine and generous on part of Mr. Gibbons and his organization. I celebrate him as The Lover of Country Children.
--E.C. Branson
From the University of North Carolina News Letter, April 11, 1923
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