Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Spring/105i/Section 22/Walker Corbett

Overview

Walter Corbett was an African American farmer during the early 20th century who lived in Burlington, North Carolina.

Biography

Walker Corbett was born in Burlington, North Carolina around 1876, 12 years after slavery had ended in the United States. He spent most of his early years sharecropping land for white farmers which was a common practice during this time and he primarily farmed tobacco. When Corbett was twenty years old in 1896 he married his first wife, Maggie Sellars, and their first child, Sarah was born in 1897. With his first wife he went on to have six children in total. His first wife died in 1909. He remarried in 1913 to Annie Liza Lee and they together had nine children. In 1915, Corbett managed to buy 20 acres of farmland of his own which meant he no longer had to sharecrop. When the United States joined World War I in 1917, Corbett profited off the sale of his tobacco to the military and he used these profits to buy more land. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, Corbett unlike many farmers managed to survive due to the fact that he knew not to plant tobacco in excess as many other farmers had done during the boom of the 1920’s₁. Not much is known about his life after the interview and it is not known when he died.

Social Issues

African American Sharecropping

During the years after the end of slavery in 1865 newly freed slaves were often forced into a system of farming known as sharecropping in which they would be allowed to farm land owned by wealthy landowners and in exchange they would share the crop grown with the landowner. However, these landowners would often take advantage of these newly emancipated African Americans by loaning them seeds and other farming supplies at very high interest rates. These high interest rates meant that many African Americans were kept in a cycle of poverty because all of their profit went to paying off loans and this created an often generational cycle of sharecropping in the postbellum south.

Tobacco Boom During WWI

With the entrance of America into WWI in 1917 there was a dramatic increase in tobacco sales due to the amount of tobacco shipped to Europe to supply the American military force which included cigarettes in every ration. This increased demand for tobacco by the United States Military meant that the tobacco industry especially within North Carolina boomed and saw a huge increase in profits. The increased demand also meant that farmers grew more tobacco than they had previously to meet the demand by the military.

Tobacco Surplus in the 1920's

After the end of World War I in 1918 the military had a lesser need for goods that were needed to sustain troops overseas and this included agricultural goods such as tobacco. This huge drop in demand meant that tobacco farmers were producing way too large an amount of tobacco and they could not sell this huge surplus. Because they were unable to sell this surplus in tobacco, many tobacco farmers in North Carolina went bankrupt and many were forced to sell their surplus crop at extremely low prices.