History 479B

Devine

Fall 2012

 

Jay R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free, Chapters 6-8

 

Chapter 6

 

  1. Why was the postbellum plantation system more fragile than the slavery system?

 

 

  1. With regard to African Americans, why was the “free labor ideology” more theoretical than real?  What factors kept it from being real?

 

 

  1. What factors – “push” and “pull” – account for the African American migration from the South in the years after World War I?  Why have some referred to this migration as the “second emancipation”?

 

 

  1. What two major shortcomings were associated with migration to the North?  How did each limit the potential for African American economic advancement?

 

 

  1. How did Garvey’s pan-Africanism differ from DuBois’s?  How did their ideas about African American political activism contrast?

 

 

  1. What had changed (and not changed) about cotton production during the first decades of the 20th century?

 

 

  1. How did the Great Depression sustain the plantation system in the South?  What role did the AAA play?

 

 

  1. Despite hard times in the North, why did blacks continue to leave the plantations during the 1930s?

 

 

  1. What evidence does Mandel cite to demonstrate an “incremental chipping away at the structure of the plantation economy”?  What structural/economic forces were at work here?  What were blacks themselves doing to undermine the plantation economy?

 

 

Chapter 7

 

1.    How did the beginning of World War II affect the plantation economy? What specific factors doomed the old system of production?

 

 

2.    Was labor being “pushed” or “pulled” out of the South? Why? How does Mandle know?

 

 

3.    How did African Americans’ employment opportunities change after the beginning of the war? What remained as impediments to their achieving employment equality with whites?

 

 

4.    Why was black labor “underused” and “misused” during the war? (p. 88)

 

 

5.    Why was the war time environment conducive to blacks’ protests against discrimination?

 

 

6.    Why did the war erode paternalism in the South? How did the planters restructure their work system given the exodus of black laborers?

 

 

7.    According to Mandle, the end of the plantation economy occurred in two steps. What were they? Why did step one have to come before step two?

 

 

Chapter 8

 

1.    According to Mandle, “the civil rights movement was born precisely because the South had begun to change.” (95)  How does he connect these two developments? Why was this the case?

 

 

2.    In responding to the new assertiveness of African Americans, white southern businessmen responded in two ways. What were they?

 

 

3.    The civil rights movement tended to be more effective in the South than in the North.  According to Mandle, what accounts for this?

 

 

4.    Mandle argues that African Americans’ route to a higher standard of living was blocked by “demand” and “supply” problems. (p. 98) What was the difference between the two? What were some examples of each?

 

 

5.    What were the three variables that seem to explain African Americans’ poor performance in the business sector?  What three variables help to explain African Americans’ occupational mobility – that is, their ability to move into better (and higher paying) jobs?

 

 

6.    African Americans did well in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the 1970s this economic progress seemed to ebb. Why did this happen?  Who or what was to blame?  Why did this development produce more inequality within the African American population?

 

 

7.    Given the statistics Mandle introduces, why would “get an education” and “get married before having kids” be good pieces of advice if one wanted economic success?

 

 

8.    How are economic growth and increases in productivity linked to education?

 

 

9.    Why does Mandle believe that the economic interests of African Americans and whites have converged?