Customer Reviews

SECOND GREAT EMANCIPATION: MECH.COTTONPICKER, BLACK MIGRATION & MODERN SOUTH

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Every black person in America, who has family roots traceable to the South, would be well served to see their roots from an incredibly enlightening paradigm. ROOTS has a new meaning...found in this great book.

Having been raised with seven siblings in the 1940's and '50's in Memphis, TN, the capital city of what was, back then, "King Cotton", I found this book to be more than an in-depth revelation of the "way it really was". Truth is, without an understanding of the historical realities found in The Second Great Emancipation, neither those who lived it, nor those who seek to know it from the "outside", could possibly do so with clarity and relevance. Donald Holley wrestled to paper more than "data". He planted seeds for understanding not only the history of the nation-and-culture-changing cotton picker machine, but, he also, even if inadvertently, sowed seeds for understanding historical racial relations in America; relations from a perspective which is not commonly known.

I should know a little bit about this matter. Along with my 7 siblings, I was born and raised in the primarily poor black community of South Memphis, Tennessee. Nothing would be necessarily unusual about the "when and where" of my childhood, except that we were white folks living in the black community, along with less than a dozen other white families that I knew of. My father was a Baptist minister who was an activist for the concerns of blacks, not out of or for political reasons, but for his love for others, no matter who they were, black or white.

Furthermore, the principal character in this book is my great-uncle (my mother's uncle), John Rust, who is credited with having invented the first commercially viable cotton picker. His office and shop were right down the street from father's church, which bordered the white and black communities. My mother, as an older teenager, had been her uncle's "clerk", and stood to inherit his fortunes, if only she had not "married that crippled preacher". Uncle John did not approve.

When I was a little boy, early morning, old, rickety buses rode past our home taking many family friends to the cotton fields to pick cotton, further south from our home. They would sing as if they didn't have a problem in the world, or at least that's how it sounded to my childishly ignorant ears.

But, as this book reveals, the invention of the cotton picker not only "emancipated" young and old blacks from backbreaking work in the fields; not only did it directly impact the economy of the South and the nation; it also laid the foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950's.

What Uncle John did to alleviate the pain of the transitional "progress" of both blacks and whites is in itself a human interest story worth telling, not to say anything about it's historical significance.

Through it all, he became wealthy. Ironically, the millions of dollars that Uncle John endowed to the University of Arkansas (and, Mississippi) were originally intended for my mother. If only she hadn't married a preacher.

My mother, God bless her, never talked about it all, unless asked. This was not because of any bitterness; rather, because---as she put it---"I gained the greater riches: A relationship with Jesus Christ, and a relationship with your Daddy".

Somewhat similarly, though it would take too long of a while, the blacks we knew "gained" also. But, neither Mama's nor the blacks' gain came without cost...great costs.

This book successfully unveils a critical part of the real story of those days with vital clarifications for those who would seek to know the truth of what really happened during The Second Great Emancipation.
Joe Lutz