Agricultural Workers, Tenant Farmers, and the Midcentury U.S. Welfare State: A View from the Lower Mississippi Valley.

This article examines the role of federal food assistance programs—specifically surplus commodity distribution and the Food Stamp Program—in the cotton-producing regions of the Mississippi Valley during the mid-twentieth century. Contrary to the common view that agricultural workers and tenant farmers were excluded from the U.S. welfare state, the article argues they were unequally incorporated through these food programs, which reinforced racial and class hierarchies by mirroring older agrarian credit systems controlled by white planters and local officials. These programs, originally designed as adjuncts to farm policy rather than social welfare, became tools of political and economic control, with local authorities often using food aid to suppress Black civil rights activism. Although civil rights protests led to reforms and expansions of food assistance by the 1970s, the paternalistic and disciplinary nature of these programs persisted, shaping the experiences of low-income agricultural workers and tenant farmers in the region.