Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 10/Walter Coachman

Biography

Walter Coachman was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina in 1898, as the youngest of twelve siblings. Growing up after the Civil War but before Civil Rights legislation, Coachman “realized early in life that I was a Negro, and that it was the lot of our people to get the bum end of everything.” Coachman grew up on a plantation, where his parents worked as sharecroppers. They were paid little for their labor, and Coachman’s father even died in an accident on the plantation.

Coachman’s mother managed to secure Coachman a decent education, and he ultimately attended a segregated school. At school, Coachman learned how to read, write, and “figure,” the latter of which he had an affinity for and even used to determine (and take) how much the plantation owner really owed his family.

He sought out a university path at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. To pay his tuition, he began working in the garden of the widowed Alice Reynolds, whose kindness inspired him to be a better person and restored his faith in the kindness of others.

In March 1939, at the time of Walter’s statement, he was 41 and married with four children. The Great Depression hit the country hard, but had significantly devastated the already impoverished African American community. Working as a preacher, Coachman preached at four different parishes to maximize his income and still struggled to support his family. He planned to buy the small, self-sufficient farm his family was living and working on.

Coachman took great pride in the fact that his four children all attended school; he noticed the push for young black and white men to join the Work Progress Administration (WPA). His oldest son, 17, was “interested in electricity,” and Coachman vowed to support his education in “every way I can.”

Sharecropping

Sharecropping was a feudal-esque system where “families rent small plots of land from the landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of the year” (HISTORY, 2010). Legal under Jim Crow laws and Black Codes, it pushed the bounds of the recently-passed 13th amendment (Cohen). Sharecropping arose out of a Southern demand for labor, white supremacy, and a newly-freed workforce in search of jobs; sharecropping was a limiting system for freedmen and women, ultimately “unfair and exploitative” (Stanford). The job offered little to no mobility due to the meager salaries that sharecroppers received, trapping African Americans in their jobs for life. Historians describe sharecropping as “slavery by another name” (PBS, 2012).

Segregated Schools in the 1920s

The fight for quality education of African American students endured long before the prominence of the Little Rock Nine and the historic Brown v. Board of Education case; a quiet protest against “separate but equal” began in black schools in the 1920s. Black schools were under-resourced and underfunded.(Pellegrino, Mann, Russell). Regular classroom items, like desks and textbooks, were often hand-me-downs from local white schools (some textbooks would arrive inscribed with racial slurs.) In spite of teaching at these underfunded schools, many black teachers became increasingly well-trained: by 1930 75% of teachers were estimated to have at least a bachelor’s degree (Pellegrino, Mann, Russell). Teachers were described by their students as “caring” and sacrificial in the name of education (Pellegrino, Mann, Russell). Black communities came together to work around a lack of state funding for education, and often raised money for “learning spaces.”

The New Deal & The Great Depression

In South Carolina and countrywide during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was a revolutionary program aimed at improving conditions for the average unemployed American. During FDR’s first 100 days he passed record legislation, permitting the establishment of “alphabet agencies” that would eventually guide the nation towards “relief, recovery, and reform.” Agencies included the WPA, the CCC, TVA, and many others; the WPA and CCC employed young men who would build public works for a salary. (HISTORY, 2009). While the United States’ entrance into World War II is argued by some to have ceased the Great Depression, economists note that countrywide conditions improved following the Depression’s worst year, 1933. The New Deal is cited as the cause of this improvement (Romer).

References

Cohen, William. “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 1865-1940: A Preliminary Analysis.” The Journal of Southern History 42, no. 1 (1976): 31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2205660.

History.com Editors. “New Deal.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, October 29, 2009. https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/new-deal.

History.com Editors. “Sharecropping.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, June 24, 2010. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/sharecropping.

Interview, F. Donald Atwell on Walter Coachman, March 15, 1939, Folder 829, Federal Writing Project Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill.

Pellegrino, Anthony M., Linda J. Mann, and William B. Russell. "Historical Examination of the Segregated School Experience." The History Teacher 46, no. 3 (2013): 355-72. Accessed July 9, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/43264130.

Romer, Christina D. "The Nation in Depression." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 2 (1993): 19-39. Accessed July 9, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2138198.

“Sharecropping.” Stanford History Education Group. Accessed July 9, 2020. https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons/sharecropping.

“Sharecropping.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed July 9, 2020. http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/sharecropping/.