Southern Agrarianism

Fundamentals

The concept known as Southern Agrarianism offers a window into a particular vision of society, one rooted firmly in the earth. At its core, Southern Agrarianism advances a perspective stressing the primacy of family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Individuals adhering to this philosophy believed an agricultural economy singularly supported human flourishing. They contended that values and traditions stemming from an agrarian ethos represented an ideal foundation for a stable, coherent society, one emphasizing family and community.

This traditional social order, they argued, stood opposed to state power and the unrestrained market, leaning towards natural piety and religious observance. As a historical exemplar of such an ideal order, the Agrarians pointed to the antebellum South.

The intellectual movement formally solidified with the 1930 manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand ❉ The South and the Agrarian Tradition, authored by a collective known as “Twelve Southerners.” These essayists, poets, and critics, including figures like John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, articulated a critique of industrial capitalism and promoted a way of life they believed was consonant with European traditions, contrasting sharply with the prevailing American economic doctrines of their time. Their collective declaration proposed that agriculture, as a vocation, represented the most sensitive and refined way of life, providing a model for other occupations to approach in their own endeavors.

Southern Agrarianism, at its heart, describes a societal vision where life entwined with the land nurtures community, self-reliance, and a deep respect for inherited traditions.

The significance of this viewpoint extends into the realms of daily life, touching upon the very fibers of individual and communal existence. Proponents believed that a deep attachment to farming and a rural existence enhanced human experience. This required labor, they argued, cultivated moral character and fostered responsible individuals.

Family and locale, when rooted in the earth, allowed for the organic growth of stable associations. People could then experience the goods of a grounded community, including leisure, friendship, and shared cultural practices, free from the acquisitive pressures of an industrial existence.

Understanding Southern Agrarianism necessitates appreciating its historical context, particularly its emergence during the economic anxieties of the Great Depression. The Agrarians viewed the Depression and President Roosevelt’s New Deal as moments for America to reclaim a perceived lost agrarian heritage. They argued that unchecked industrialism led to rapacious corporations, wage slavery, and an empty consumerism, setting the stage for societal discord. Their perspective, while idealized, sought to offer a counter-narrative to the prevailing urban and industrial forces of the era.

The idea of Southern Agrarianism, while often discussed in broad strokes, carries nuanced implications when viewed through the lens of textured hair heritage. The direct connection may not be immediately apparent in formal academic discourse, but the principles of self-sufficiency, reliance on natural resources, and the deep significance of inherited practices—all central to agrarian thought—find echoes in the ancestral traditions of Black and mixed-race hair care. From the earth came the sustenance, the herbs, and the oils, which sustained both the body and the coiled strands that told stories of lineage and resilience.

Intermediate

Moving beyond the foundational understanding, Southern Agrarianism emerges as a complex ideology, a cultural movement deeply rooted in the historical Southern landscape. This perspective advocated for a traditional way of life, tracing its lineage back to English Cavalier culture, with its systems of aristocracy and social hierarchy. Adherents idealized a simpler, more noble, orderly, and self-reliant existence, one intrinsically linked to being close to the land.

This encompassed not only the cultivation of crops but also the raising of animals, fostering an understanding of husbandry and stewardship. The notion of restoring what once was, and what might have been, permeated their philosophical leanings.

The meaning of Southern Agrarianism became an articulation of Southern identity, framed against the rapid industrialization and modernization occurring across the United States. It presented a vision where human dignity found its fullest expression through direct engagement with the soil, fostering a sense of rootedness absent in the burgeoning urban centers. The intellectual stance of the Southern Agrarians, while presented as universal ideals, derived explicitly from their experiences as Southerners. They believed a society dominated by science, technology, and industry would suffer impoverishment in manners, art, education, community, and spirit.

However, the historical meaning of Southern Agrarianism is incomplete without acknowledging its inherent contradictions, particularly concerning race. The Agrarians unapologetically lauded the antebellum South as the prime historical exemplar of their ideal order, a period built upon the brutal foundation of chattel slavery. Scholars consistently highlight the racism embedded in Southern Agrarian writings, a factor that significantly contributed to their failure as policymakers. While some Agrarians, on occasion, acknowledged that farm tenancy affected both African Americans and white Southerners, critiques regarding the South’s racial problems often triggered prejudiced outbursts.

Consider Allen Tate’s disturbing assertion in “A View of the Whole South” ❉ “I argue it this way ❉ the white race seems determined to rule the Negro race in its midst; I belong to the white race; therefore I intend to support white rule. Lynching. will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises” (Hoffschwelle). Such statements underscore the undeniable white supremacist undercurrents that cannot be separated from the historical movement, despite some Agrarians like Robert Penn Warren attempting to distance their vision from slavery and racial tyranny.

The historical legacy of Southern Agrarianism reflects a deeply nostalgic view of rural life, yet it grappled with profound internal inconsistencies, especially regarding its implicit endorsement of racial hierarchy.

The connection between Southern Agrarianism and textured hair heritage becomes especially poignant when we examine the experiences of enslaved and later, sharecropping Black communities. While the Agrarians idealized a connection to the land, the reality for African Americans living in the rural South was far from their bucolic vision. Land, for Black people, often represented exploitation and oppression, a site of struggle for freedom and self-determination. Yet, even within these oppressive structures, ancestral knowledge of the land, its flora, and its properties persisted, finding expression in daily practices, including hair care.

During enslavement, efforts were made to erase African identity, often beginning with the forced shaving or cropping of hair upon arrival in the New World. This profound indignity stripped individuals of a crucial marker of status, ethnicity, and spirituality that hair represented in many West African societies. Despite these efforts, ingenuity and resilience flourished. Enslaved people adapted, utilizing what was available from the agrarian landscape they were forced to inhabit.

• Improvised Tools ❉ Lacking traditional combs and tools, enslaved individuals sometimes used wool carders—paddle brushes with sharp metal teeth designed for detangling wool fibers—to work through their textured hair. This adaptation underscores a remarkable resourcefulness.
• Natural Moisturization ❉ Anecdotal accounts and historical records suggest the use of readily accessible fats like bacon grease, butter, or lard to moisturize and condition hair. While perhaps not ideal for hair health, these natural substances provided some form of conditioning in dire circumstances. However, some narratives suggest these practices might have been less common than often believed, as such valuable resources were scarcely wasted.
• Protective Styles ❉ Hair wrapping or threading, where strands were bound with fabric, cotton, or even strips of eel skin to achieve defined curls when undone, offered a practical and protective means of managing hair. This method kept hair from knotting and offered a sense of order.

The shared act of communal hair care, particularly on Sundays—the singular day of rest for many enslaved individuals—became a tradition. This gathering fostered community bonds, allowing women to tend to each other’s hair, sharing stories and preserving fragments of cultural heritage in the face of immense adversity. This quiet, persistent act of care, using the bounty (however meager) of the land, formed a deeply embedded practice within the agrarian South.

The economic landscape of the Southern agrarian economy, even post-Emancipation, continued to disproportionately impact Black communities. The promise of “40 acres and a mule” after the Civil War, intended to provide economic independence, largely went unfulfilled. Instead, many Black families remained “slaves to the land,” working as sharecroppers under exploitative conditions that left little time for personal pursuits. This ongoing struggle for land ownership and self-sufficiency for Black farmers stands as a stark counterpoint to the Agrarian ideal of widespread property ownership.

Indeed, Black farm ownership, which peaked between 1910 and 1920 with over 212,000 Black farmers in the Deep South alone, saw a drastic decline from 41.4 million acres in 1920 to a mere 5.3 million acres across 32,700 farms in 2022. This systematic dispossession, often driven by discriminatory practices and racial violence, directly undermined the capacity for agrarian self-reliance within Black communities. The displacement from land impacted not only economic well-being but also the continuity of ancestral knowledge, including the traditional gathering and cultivation of natural ingredients for hair and body care, which were intrinsically linked to the land itself.

Academic

From an academic perspective, Southern Agrarianism, as elucidated by the Twelve Southerners in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), represents a conservative intellectual and cultural movement. Its core meaning delineates a critique of industrial capitalism and a romanticized defense of a particular Southern way of life, predicated on an agrarian economic and social order. This conceptualization idealizes a decentralized, land-based society, believing it fosters self-reliance, community cohesion, and moral rectitude.

The Agrarians argued for a re-establishment of traditional values, advocating for widespread property ownership and a social structure that prioritized local community over the expansive, impersonal forces of the modern state and untrammeled market. Their intellectual stance, while proposing universal ideals, emerged directly from a selective interpretation of the American South’s historical trajectory.

However, a thorough academic examination of Southern Agrarianism compels an engagement with its profound, often unaddressed, internal contradictions and moral shortcomings, particularly regarding race and the foundational institution of slavery. The Agrarians’ nostalgic embrace of the antebellum South as a societal model, despite its brutal reliance on human bondage, remains an undeniable stain upon their articulated ideals. Scholars widely acknowledge that the movement’s inability, or unwillingness, to confront the realities of racial injustice and its historical implications served as an Achilles’ heel. The notion of an “organic culture” espoused by the Agrarians proved inherently flawed when it failed to encompass the full humanity of all individuals within that society.

Academic interpretation of Southern Agrarianism uncovers a complex ideology, idealized in its vision of self-sufficiency yet inherently compromised by its historical entanglement with racial hierarchies and land dispossession.

The expropriation of land from Black farmers in the post-Civil War South stands as a critical case study illuminating the profound disjunction between the Agrarian ideal and the lived reality for African Americans. While Southern Agrarianism espoused the virtues of land ownership and a rooted existence, the very period of its intellectual articulation coincided with a systematic, coercive process of land loss for Black agriculturalists. In 1910, the Deep South boasted over 212,000 Black farmers, representing a peak in their agricultural presence. Yet, by 1920, the ownership of Black farmland plummeted from 41.4 million acres to 5.3 million acres by 2022.

This staggering 87% decline over a century represents not merely an economic shift but a profound cultural and ancestral dislocation. The dispossession resulted from discriminatory lending practices, forced sales, and outright racial intimidation, a “war waged by deed of title” that erased Black wealth and community autonomy.

This historical reality provides a powerful counter-narrative to the romanticized image of the agrarian South. For Black communities, a direct connection to the land represented not merely sustenance, but a tangible assertion of freedom, pride, and belonging, an ethos termed “Black agrarianism.” This inherent drive for self-sufficiency and communal resilience, despite immense systemic barriers, finds its echoes in ancestral hair care practices. While denied access to the very land and its bounty, these communities persisted in their traditional ways of nurturing hair, adapting ancestral wisdom to harsh new realities.

The elemental biology of textured hair, with its unique coiling patterns and propensity for dryness, demanded specific care routines, practices that long predated formal scientific understanding yet were steeped in generations of inherited knowledge. “Echoes from the Source” resound in these early adaptations, where the wisdom of the land provided improvised solutions. Prior to the transatlantic journey, African societies revered hair as a conduit to spiritual realms and a signifier of social standing, age, and identity. Hair grooming was a communal, time-intensive activity, involving natural ingredients and intricate styling techniques.

A particularly profound, though perhaps less commonly cited, example of this deep connection rests in the ancestral practice of braiding seeds into hair . Before being forcibly boarded onto transatlantic slave ships, African grandmothers would meticulously braid seeds of vital crops—okra, molokhia, levant cotton, sesame, black-eyed peas, rice, and melon—into their children’s and their own hair. This act, both of cultural preservation and a desperate gamble for survival, speaks volumes. It signifies a profound understanding of plant biology and agricultural cycles, interwoven literally into the hair’s very structure, a living archive of agricultural heritage carried across the ocean.

The hope was that these seeds, nestled within the protective coils of hair, would survive the brutal journey and allow future generations to sow their legacy in new, unfamiliar soils. This narrative, passed down through whispers and resilience, links the agrarian impulse for cultivation directly to the tender care of textured hair as a vessel of hope and continuity.

The tender thread of care continued even in the most brutal conditions. The forced removal of African hair upon enslavement, often justified as a sanitary measure, constituted a deliberate act of dehumanization, an attempt to strip away identity. Yet, against this backdrop of forced conformity, communal hair care practices emerged as acts of quiet resistance and cultural affirmation.

Sundays, the sole day of respite, became sacred moments for collective grooming. Women would gather, often under the open sky of the agrarian landscape, tending to each other’s hair.

The constraints of the plantation system, where daily life was dictated by agricultural labor, meant that hair care products were often improvised from the immediate environment. Research from the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives offers glimpses into these practices. “Aunt Tildy” Collins, an interviewee in the Born in Slavery ❉ Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, described her mother and grandmother using a “jimcrow” (likely a wool carder) to comb hair before threading it with fabric or cotton.

This innovative use of agricultural tools for hair care embodies the agrarian spirit of resourcefulness within severe limitations. Accounts also mention the use of lard or bacon grease for moisture, reflecting a profound reliance on the byproducts of their imposed agrarian existence, even if not always optimal for hair health.

As the twentieth century dawned, the agrarian South remained largely agricultural, but the Great Migration saw many African Americans leave rural areas, seeking opportunities and escaping racial violence. This societal shift gradually impacted hair care. While traditions persisted in rural communities, the burgeoning Black beauty industry, led by pioneers like Madam C.J. Walker and Annie Malone, began to offer more formalized solutions.

These entrepreneurs, often emerging from the very agricultural landscapes of the South, provided products and tools, such as hot combs, that allowed for hair straightening, reflecting a complex interplay of Eurocentric beauty standards and aspirations for social and economic mobility. The shift from agrarian-based improvised care to commercially produced products, while offering new avenues, also mirrored the broader societal pressures faced by Black communities seeking acceptance and opportunity beyond the farm.

The Agrarians, in their academic arguments, often struggled to articulate a coherent economic program, frequently accused of being economic reactionaries. Their abstract defense of agricultural life often neglected the systemic issues of poverty, land tenure, and racial discrimination that defined the lives of the majority of those who actually worked the Southern soil, particularly Black farmers. This disconnect between theory and lived experience presents a significant challenge to the romanticized interpretation of Southern Agrarianism.

The understanding of Southern Agrarianism, therefore, requires a dual lens ❉ appreciating its stated ideals of self-sufficiency and communal bonds, while rigorously scrutinizing its historical context and its complicity in perpetuating racial inequalities. The story of textured hair care in the South, from ancestral seed-braiding to the ingenuity of enslaved and sharecropping communities, offers a potent counter-narrative, revealing a deeper, more resilient connection to the land and its resources than the Agrarians themselves might have acknowledged. It is a powerful example of how elements of agrarian life, rooted in soil and plant knowledge, continued to nourish a heritage of self-care and identity against unimaginable odds.

Reflection on the Heritage of Southern Agrarianism

The journey through Southern Agrarianism, viewed through the tender lens of textured hair heritage, ultimately transcends a mere historical definition. It transforms into a profound meditation on resilience, adaptation, and the enduring power of ancestral wisdom. The Agrarians’ vision, though idealized and often tragically flawed in its historical application, contained a yearning for rootedness, for a symbiotic relationship with the land that, in a parallel and far more authentic way, defined the survival and cultural expression of Black and mixed-race communities in the American South. The soil, for African Americans, was both a site of immense suffering and a source of profound knowledge, a source of herbs, oils, and the very fibers used to tend to precious strands.

Our hair, with its diverse textures and infinite possibilities, holds an unbroken lineage to these past experiences. It whispers stories of hands improvising with the bounty of the earth—lard, and cotton threads—to moisturize and protect. It carries the memory of communal gatherings on sun-drenched Sundays, where shared rituals of care solidified bonds and reclaimed moments of dignity. The significance here extends beyond aesthetics; it speaks to a holistic wellness, where the health of the scalp and strand intertwined with the health of the spirit, cultivated through ancestral practices and intimate connections to the land.

The systematic erosion of Black land ownership, a stark counterpoint to the Agrarian dream of widespread land tenure, further emphasizes the critical nature of this heritage. The knowledge once intrinsically tied to cultivating and harvesting specific plants for hair remedies, or the understanding of local natural resources, became threatened as communities were dispossessed. Yet, the wisdom persisted, passed down through oral traditions, through quiet acts of resistance, and through the very DNA of textured hair, which, against all odds, continues to flourish. The legacy of Southern Agrarianism, stripped of its problematic historical baggage, offers a mirror, reflecting the deep, elemental connection between people, land, and the vibrant heritage held within each strand.

This exploration allows us to appreciate the ingenuity of those who, despite immense hardship, found ways to sustain their cultural identity and personal well-being, often by drawing directly from the agrarian environment forced upon them. It is a call to recognize the subtle yet profound ways in which land, labor, and lineage have intertwined to shape the textured hair experience, inviting a deeper appreciation for the enduring beauty and power of our collective ancestral story.