The determinants of excessive indebtedness of the rural poor
ConclusionThe foregoing analysis helps to explain how the poverty cycle deepens and becomes increasingly intolerable for the rural poor.
Correlates of rural black poverty
ConclusionThe misery of America’s rural black farmers and farm workers continue as a reproach to the nation; black farmers and farm workers, numbering about 328,000 in 1970, have not adequately shared in the enormous productivity of American agriculture and in the rising prosperity of the nation.Despite modest steps to improve their level of living, they remain, by and large, at subpoverty-income levels, lacking adequate health care, ill-housed, malnourished, and poorly educated.6 The annual migration rate of rural black youth is insignificantly lower today than during the great migration flows following the world wars; this is a testimony to the barrenness of the alternative lifestyle under which they might live.
Rural-Urban Migration of Blacks: Past and Future
A FTER THE 1920 population census Congress failed for the only time in its history to reapportion the seats of the House of Representatives. When the census results were in, it was found that for the first time urban population exceeded rural in the United States. Representatives from rural states that stood to lose a seat in reapportionment argued either for an increase in the size of the House to protect their absolute representation or favored no reapportionment at all. The affected states were in the Midwest, New England, and the South. Thus the issue was by no means a narrowly sectional one. But one major contributing factor was the migration of rural southern Negroes to northern industrial states, which the southern congressmen insisted was only temporary. "For the last two years," said Representative Johnson of Mississippi, "there have been special trains carrying thousands of Negroes and a great many white people to the northern cities, and since this financial condition has come