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Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 282. Introduction, maps, notes, acknowledgments, index. $39.95.)
C. Vann Woodward first drew widespread attention to the "colonial" nature of the economy of the New South in 1951, and Nan Elizabeth Woodruff now offers us a study of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta as the "American Congo." She situates the study in a comparative context, viewing the counties crowding the lower Mississippi River as similar to the interior regions of Africa in that they were as part of a colonial regime that sanctioned the violent efforts of landowners to control the economic behavior of black laborers. Tracing the world of delta blacks from the late nineteenth century to the early stages of the Cold War, Woodruff argues that African Americans challenged planter attempts to control their lives at every turn and created a tradition of protest and organized resistance that undergirded the modern civil rights movement.
Woodruff crafts a steady narrative of black resistance, successfully demonstrating that delta blacks consistently worked the system of segregation to their maximum advantage over a seventy-year period. She is particularly skillful at showing how ex-slaves and their descendants manipulated systems of sharecropping, peonage, and debt to wring out a...