The Capitalist Farming Frontier

This paper offers some historical reflection, critique, and exploration into the souls of Black farmers navigating what my research calls the Capitalist Farming Frontier, a space occupied and dominated by the structures of white supremacy. When Black people were emancipated and recast into a period known as second slavery, from 1877 to 1965, the Capitalist Farming Frontier was shaped by W.E.B. Du Bois, who addressed land ownership, white and Black agricultural workers, and the exploitation of farmers who lost ninety-percent of their land between 1910 -1997. I explore the depths of the framers' incarceration on their land during the second iteration of American slavery. Drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois’s publications and activist campaigns for farmers, my research examines decades of Du Bois’s concerns regarding the Black farmer and cooperative organizing. My critique of his concerns via art, ads, editorials, and articles published in the Crisis Magazine showcases Du Bois as an emerging leftist seeking interracial unity among the farming class. Du Bois viewed his maturation toward socialism and concerns regarding land reform and property distribution through the lens of his first fictional work, Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). At first glance, Quest of the Silver Fleece reflected Du Bois's emerging radicalism and a degree of naïveté; he crafted a narrative of the white capitalist class operating strategically to divide the Black and white working class. In this novel, Du Bois’s socialist predisposition toward the political and economic vice and ills constituting the American realities of capitalism was made clear. It was the first major example of how he viewed a socialist world. This paper juxtaposes a Marxist paradigm regarding an imaginative farming frontier to Du Bois’s 1934 publication of Black Reconstruction.