“Come Now, and Let Us Reason Together”: African American Home Demonstration Empowerment Pedagogy Develops Rural Women Leaders, 1928–55

This paper examines how African-American home demonstration agents in Alabama used empowerment pedagogy, an educational method that affirms identity and fosters self-improvement and confidence, to cultivate leadership capabilities in Alabama’s African-American farm women and girls. It argues that black women and girls experienced leadership development and consciousness-raising through participating in United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cooperative Extension home demonstration and 4-H programs to the extent that some became essential Extension program and community leaders.

The USDA practiced discrimination in Extension programs through unequitable funding based on race. This paper will show how institutional discrimination, the second-class citizenship status of black females across social class, and the challenges of subsistence agrarianism combined to give a unique Afrocentric cultural form and function to the standard Extension program. The standard program required local women and girls to participate in planning and leadership which facilitated their personal growth and political consciousness. This topic explores the themes of African-American strategies of resistance to white supremacy through education and rural domesticity as an emancipatory realm for black women and girls.