While we are building more good roads, why not build more good people? There are in this state 317,000 persons who, if they are not to be an insupportable weight on the advancement of North Carolina, have got to have better bodies and better equipped minds. They are the families of the 63,000 white farm tenants in the state, some of whom live on a cash income of 8 cents per person per day. The renters, those who own their work stock and implements, have for themselves and families an average daily cash income of 12 cents per person. The 8-cent men are the croppers, who are staked to everything by their landlords. Walter Page called them “the forgotten men.”
Those astounding and pitiful facts are brought out in recent University of North Carolina Extension Bulletin “How Farm Tenants Live,” by Mr. J.A. Dickey and Dr. E.C. Branson, based on investigations by Mr. Dickey in Baldwin and Williams townships in Chatham County, conditions there being typical of the whole state. It shows that the Tarheel white farmer renter has an annual cash income of $251, the cropper $153! Says the bulletin: “The average income per person in the 329 farm families investigated, white and black owners and tenants, was only 23 cents per day! How could anybody live on less money and live at all? How can white tenants on a daily cash income of 12 cents a day per person ever buy and pay for farms of their own? They do it—57 of the white farm owners of this particular territory have done it during the last 20 years. They do it, but how they do it passes understanding. And moreover they have done it by self-effort alone. Can this record be beat in any other state of the Union? This is what I have in mind when I say that God Almighty made North Carolina to be a paradise for poor folks—that is to say, for the average poor man content with merely keeping soul and body together.”
But that is not enough. All North Carolina, empire in size and fairyland in fertility, must be made a paradise where the poor rise up and cast off forever the fetters of their poverty. In a word, the white tenant of North Carolina must be educated into the wisdom of buying land. What is more, the state must make it as easy as possible for him to accomplish that which makes a man a sovereign being, ownership of home and soil.
From the Asheville Citizen, as reprinted in the University of North Carolina News Letter, April 11, 1923
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