Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section20/Josie Fleming: Midwife and Farmer

Biography

Overview

Josie Fleming was a hardworking black woman who was born around 1870 in Aswell, Alabama of her formerly enslaved parents, Bella Thompson and Abe Hunter. She married George Fleming and gave birth to nine children, and they lived on an eighty-acre farm which George inherited from his father. As a first-generation free worker, Fleming provided for her family and community by working as a farmer and a midwife.

Farming

Fleming made the most of the eighty-acre farm through long workdays and resourcefulness. During the summer, she canned fruits and vegetables to consume later in the year and rotated her crops depending on the season. Josie also farmed hogs and took pride herself in her ability to "use every inch of the hog.” Fleming used the “chitterlings” or “guts” to make sausages, gelatin, and sauces that she sold both in town markets and house to house. In addition to hog products, Fleming made syrups, jellies, and wines, and they grew cotton to receive government checks. Fleming was very satisfied with her hard work and her life, believing that "God helps them that helps themselves."

Midwifery

Josie Fleming also worked as a midwife. She assisted mothers around Aswell give birth and made teas out of roots as remedies for various ailments. Although she knew clients often would be unable to provide payment, Fleming did not have “the heart to…turn folks down when they’re in trouble.” Amid a syphilis outbreak in her community, babies were often debilitated or “marked” due to congenital syphilis, and she assumed sanitary precautions to avoid contracting the disease like taking mercury tablets and avoiding deliveries when she had cuts on her hands. Josie Fleming was grateful for the free government-run syphilis-treatment clinics in Aswell and was “proud they” were “trying to stomp” the disease “out.”

Social Context

Racial Discrimination in the Agriculture Industry

In the 1930’s, discriminatory policies and economic opportunities inhibited the success of black farmers in the American South and in Alabama, leading to significant decreases in black owned farms and an immense wealth disparity between black and white farmers. The fundamental basis of farming is land ownership; however, Organizations like the Home Owner's Loan Corporation refused to give mortgages to black Americans by implementing exclusive redlining policies which rejected mortgage requests in black communities. Without access to loans, black farmers did not have the resources to obtain land, forcing many to become tenant farmers. For those who were able to obtain land, plots were often too small to be self-sustaining. In Alabama and the South as a whole, “close to 50% of all Black-operated farms [were] under 50 acres in size” between 1910 and 1987. In addition to insufficient acreage, government initiatives to aid farmers disproportionately benefited white people and created more financial insecurity for black farmers. Although 37% of low-income southern farmers were black,  The New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) only distributed 23% of standard rebuilding loans to this population in 1939. Furthermore, it granted white farmers emergency funds that were on average 20% larger than those given to black farmers. Additionally, organizations often rejected aid requests made by black farmers, denying opportunity for economic mobility. Without the funding which their white competitors received, black farmers could not expand nor improve their farms through investments like technological advancements and were often in a perpetual state of financial instability.(CITE) Another force targeting black farmers was the use of deceptive schemes that took advantage of the illiteracy of many black farmers to take their land. Local government officials, white property owners, and legal practitioners executed such schemes which included “tax sales, partition sales, and foreclosures.”

The accumulation of oppressive systems caused many black farms to fail. In Alabama, 89% of black farms earned less than $10,000 each year (operational costs unaccounted for). As a result, 50% of black farmers depended on other sources of income. Ultimately, between 1930 to 1950, the percentage of black owned farms declined by over 40% while white farms decreased by less than 6%. This statistic demonstrates the impact of the widespread discriminatory policies that systematically drove black people out of the agriculture industry.

Access to Medical Care for Black People in the South

General

Access to proper medical care for black people was rare in the south in the twentieth century due to widespread segregation of hospitals. The absence of educational opportunities in the medical profession contributed to the disparity and led many black communities to rely on the unstandardized care of midwives. Black people made up 2% of medical professionals “around 1900 and remained there into the 1980s” because only two institutions, Meharry Medical College and Howard University School of Medicine, trained black people.

Syphilis

In the American south in the 1930’s, syphilis was an epidemic. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease (STD) which develops over time and eventually leads to death. The initial symptoms of this disease include ulcers and rashes; however, as the disease cultivates, bacteria begin consuming bone and bodily tissues including those of prime organs like the heart. In the final stage, Syphilis spreads to the nervous system and can cause “paresis, gait disturbance, blindness, and dementia.” In the 1940's, Penicillin, a powerful antibiotic, was discovered and used to effectively treat the STD.

The Tuskegee Study

From 1932 to 1972, the Public Health Service conducted the Tuskegee study. This observational study followed hundreds of people as they suffered the effects of the disease “for the stated purpose of understanding the natural course of” syphilis. Despite the stated purpose, the STD’s long term effects were already scientific knowledge because a similar observational study was conducted in Oslo years earlier. This redundancy suggests an alternative purpose of the Tuskegee study: “to prove that syphilis was 'different' in black” people. The study targeted a black community in rural Alabama, taking advantage of the population’s illiteracy and inaccessibility to medical care. Tuskegee scientists promised free medical care and then denied patients effective treatment, discouraged them from seeking outside medical advice, and conducted tests without consent to track the progress of the disease. In one event, scientists announced “LAST CHANCE FOR SPECIAL FREE TREATMENT” and performed spinal punctures on participants which are “painful and…potentially dangerous procedure[s] with absolutely no therapeutic effect” to test whether syphilis had reached the nervous system. This nonconsensual human experimentation led to many unwarranted deaths and unnecessary pain. The Tuskegee study only concluded once the Associated Press revealed the truth behind the study in 1972. In response, the United States Government ended the study and paid the remaining subjects and the families of those deceased ten million dollars in retribution.

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References

Aslan, Marcella, and Marianne Wanamaker. “Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 133, no. 1, National Library of Medicine (August 2, 2017): 407-455. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6258045/.

Byrd, Michael and Linda A. Clayton. “Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States: a Historical Survey.” Journal of the National Medical Association, vol. 93, no. 3, National Library of Medicine (March 2001): 11-34. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2593958/pdf/jnma00341-0013.pdf.

Castro, Abril and Caius Z. Willingham. "Progressive Governance Can Turn the Tide for Black Farmers." Center for American Progress, April 3, 2019. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/progressive-governance-can-turn-tide-black-farmers/.

Jones, James H. “Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.” New York: Free Press, 1992, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/jones-blood.html.

“Midwife and Farmer” Unknown interviewer, between 1936 and 1940, Folder 92, Federal Writers’ Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Zabawa, Robert. “The Black Farmer and Land in South-Central Alabama: Strategies to Preserve a Scarce Resource.” Human Ecology, vol. 19, no. 1, Springer (March 1991): 61-81. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4602999.