Conversation

“In its heyday, the Dyess project unquestionably had a positive impact on its cooperators. A 1939 study recorded high satisfaction with Dyess’s “school, health, and library systems.” The colony’s first farmer, Harve Smith, told a reporter in 1938: “It’s the best proposition a poor man ever had… Here, they’ve given a man a chance when it looked like no one else would.”

Only a certain type of poor man, however, was offered this proposition. In addition to economic requirements, an eligible farmer had to be (as one historian summarized) “under fifty, a resident of Arkansas, and a member of the white race.” Dyess was, after all, located in the Jim Crow South, and even New Deal programs outside the South were often racially exclusionary. Black workers were eligible for federal construction jobs in Dyess Colony, but they slept in segregated barracks and were ineligible to live in the community they helped build.”

https://contingentmagazine.org/2021/05/19/down-in-dyess/