| My dissertation project details the interconnections of race, labor, and land usage overtime from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth-century U.S. South. To examine these themes closely, I focus on the Red Hills region, a forty-mile stretch of land between Thomas County, in southern Georgia, and Tallahassee, Florida. The area became a winter colony for wealthy northern hunters in the decades after Reconstruction, and thus prospered from regional tourism--a growing theme in scholarly studies of the New South. Northern hunters, almost all wealthy industrialists, consolidated land in the region, thus closing lands that would have otherwise been available for small-scale farming and for use as common hunting grounds. They employed a mostly African-American labor force to work on their estates as domestic servants, dog handlers, liverymen, and as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. By displacing whites and employing local blacks, hunting plantations became a divisive force in the town. Plantation owners were concerned with implementing what they considered to be a progressive labor policy with regards to their southern workers. What resulted was a model of welfare capitalism in which white owners created worker communities and subsidized homes, automobiles, and health care, in return for a workforce that remained closely clustered and thus under constant scrutiny. According to oral testimonies and memoirs from black plantation workers, white northerners fostered opportunities for class mobility in a place where labor was limited to agricultural or poorly paid domestic work, but they also circumscribed black action in many ways. As a scholarly case study, the Red Hills Region brings into relief lines of race, class, and regionalism in postwar society. As a public history project, the study allows for close work with Red Hills community members to document and interpret elements of the community's past that have previously gone unstudied. |
