he government’s agricultural program meant reduced income. Wholesale fraud in the payment of parity checks occurred. Tenants who complained to the Department of Agriculture in Washington D.C. were referred back to the locality of where they lived, and trouble of a serious nature often resulted from the white landlords. Even when this did not happen, in many cases, tenants failed to receive their checks. Compulsory reduction of acreage for cotton and tobacco crops, regulated by local boards in which blacks had no representation, meant drastic reduction of their already low income. According to Guy Johnson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina in 1934, the burden on the African-American under the AAA was a catastrophe. His thoughts on this subject were as follows:Even in the administration of federal relief, the Civil Works Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration etc., there has been, particularly in the lower South, a tendency to perpetuate the existing inequalities. Negro tenants received pitifully little of the crop reduction money last fall. Landlords quite generally took charge of the checks and applied them to back debts of the tenants. Furthermore, many landlords are known to have ‘understandings’ with local relief administrators to prevent the ‘demoralization’ of their Negro labor, and it is reported that some go as far as to charge to their tenants’ accounts all food and other supplies furnished by the relief office. The director of relief in a southern seaboard city remarked not long ago, ‘I don’t like this fixing of a wage scale for work relief. Why, the niggers in this town are getting so spoiled working on these relief jobs at thirty cents an hour that they won’t work on the docks for fifty cents a day like they did last year.’ 13In May 1933, Congress approved creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the largest sing...
