The Dammed River
As the postbellum South began its long road to recovery, the government saw industrialization as a perfect tool in creating economic prosperity for the region. In order to achieve this, better means of transportation, wider-spread access to electricity, and protection of industrial centers from environmental disasters such as flooding were desperately needed. The government created Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to tackle these challenges. Although TVA was quite affective in achieving these results, the industrialization it brought to the region had many detrimental effects for the poor farmers near their project sites, especially the poor blacks in the region. These farmers are still recovering from the discriminatory policies the corporation enacted nearly a century ago.
On May 18th 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act into law, officially creating the federal corporation called the Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA. This newly founded corporation was put in control of the maintenance and development of the Tennessee River watershed, the extent of which includes almost all of Tennessee as well as significant portions of Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. The corporation, as outlined in its founding Act, sought to provide flood control to the region, ease navigation along the river, and create an inexpensive means of energy generation that would benefit not only the urban centers, but also the poor agricultural communities that populated the region.
With this mission in mind, TVA decided that dams were the best means of achieving its goals. The corporation promptly began work on its first project, the construction of Norris Dam located along the Clinch River in the northeastern corner of Tennessee. Although this dam would provide protection from floods for the urban and industrial centers that were beginning to develop downstream from the dam site, the area immediately upstream from the dam would be completely flooded. This soon to be flooded land was far from empty of residents. The region contained many small farmers, ranchers and homesteaders, who were forced to abandon their family homes and farms, when TVA began its construction on the river. By the end of the project, 37,000 acres of some of “the best agricultural land in the state” was underwater, some 2,899 families were displaced from their land, and 5,226 ancestral graves had been relocated.
The Norris Dam project set a clear precedent for how TVA would manage its future projects and who would be the primary beneficiaries of them. As TVA continued to build fifteen more dams by the end of 1944, it solidified its policies, which now explicitly targeted the removal of small, subsistence farmers so as to clear the land for large, commercial farms. In a region with a long tradition of subsistence and tenant farming, it is not surprising that this policy led to the displacement of over 15,000 families by the mid 1940s. Although TVA had originally been created as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, the corporations policy of displacing small farmers coupled with the economic climate of the Great Depression led to even harder transitions into new jobs for the displaced residents. Most of these families did not have the means to buy new tracts of land and continue their farming elsewhere. Thus, many sought low-skill jobs in the numerous coal mines, mills, and factories that had began to crop up around the region. Although the transition to industrial jobs did result in a general increased in standard of living for most families, it came at the cost of agency. These families now had very little choice in the matter of their occupation and could not continue to work in the fields even if they wanted to. With their land under water, the mill, mine, and factory jobs were the only work to be found.
As TVA cleared the land of small, poorer farmers, large, mechanized farming operations owned by wealthier individuals were allowed to populate the region, reducing the number of both agricultural laborers and agricultural land owners. While eastern Tennessee had had some of the highest rates of black landowner and farmers, most of these black farmers were not the wealthy individuals who could afford to keep their own or buy new land. Thus the displacement of farmers from the region deeply affected this minority population in one of the few places where they had gained significant ground.
As TVA cleared the land of small, poorer farmers, large, mechanized farming operations owned by wealthier individuals were allowed to populate the region, reducing the number of both agricultural laborers and agricultural land owners. While eastern Tennessee had had some of the highest rates of black landowner and farmers, most of these black farmers were not the wealthy individuals who could afford to keep their own or buy new land. Thus the displacement of farmers from the region deeply affected this minority population in one of the few places where they had gained significant ground.
As TVA began to give some basic support to the displaced farmers, they increasingly redirected the farmers to already in place government agencies such as the local Extension Agencies and Resettlement Departments. These agencies were primarily manned by the college educated individuals in the local community or by outsiders who had been brought in to assist in the help with the resettlement of the displaced families. Although these groups often provided much assistance to the white farmers seeking new land or a new job, the black farmers rarely benefitted from the agencies’ support. Almost all of the college educated people from the region were white and those who were not were not often hired due to the legalized discriminatory practices of the Jim Crow Era South. Similarly, the outsiders who had come from the North to assist in the transitions off the land were mostly white and failed to empathize with the poor, black farmers. Thus the discrimination and racism that ran rampant throughout the region did not pause its reign in order to help these black farmers relocate after TVA had kicked them off their land.
As the century progressed, TVA slowed its dam construction projects and began to focus more on the hydroelectric energy that could be generated using those dams. Fewer families were displaced by the corporation’s later projects, but the damage had already been done. TVA’s policies had led to the disenfranchisement of poor farmers throughout the region, with disproportionate effects on the poor black farmers. As the region began to shift to industrialized urban centers, the domain of the TVA increasingly lost its rural, agricultural character with rich, whites being the primary beneficiary from this transition and poor, black farmers, by no fault of their own, pulling the shortest straw.
