“All the Earmarks of a Peonage Farm in the Southland”? The Politics of African American Environmental Labor for the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Rural Midwest

In December 1937, the Chicago Defender’s front page demanded a federal inquiry into a downstate Illinois Civilian Conservation Corps camp that twenty-three African American enrollees—several from Chicago—claimed had “all the earmarks of a peonage farm in the southland.” In many ways, the enrollees were rejecting the sort of manual environmental labor under white bosses that tens of thousands of African American migrants had explicitly rejected in the 1910s and 1920s when they left the South for cities in the North like Chicago. For many African American CCC enrollees in Illinois, though, it seemed that the South had followed them North.

Now mostly forgotten, these young men helped reshape the Midwestern landscape: digging ditches, draining swamps, clearing brush, and planting trees. Nationwide, roughly 250,000 African Americans served in the CCC, at least 16,000 of which served in Illinois—between 25 and 33 percent of all eligible men in the state (and because more than 75% of African Americans statewide were southern-born, the overwhelming majority of black CCC laborers in Illinois were migrants). More than a generation earlier, before the first stirrings of the Great Migration and before most enrollees were born, Booker T. Washington exhorted African Americans, “Our pathway must be up through the soil, up through swamps, up through forests, up through the streams and rocks.” Given that the Great Migration was in part a repudiation of this sort of labor and this sort of accommodationist thinking, what should we make of migrants once again undertaking environmental labor, this time in the rural North? This paper uses the 1937 conflict over race and environmental labor in downstate Illinois as a lens through which to examine how the Great Migration forged a hybrid environmental culture—blending North and South—amongst black Chicagoans working for the CCC during the Depression.