A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland

by Sydney Nathans

The exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South is a central theme of black life and liberation in the twentieth century. A Mind to Stay offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration. Sydney Nathans tells the rare story of people who moved from being enslaved to becoming owners of the very land they had worked in bondage, and who have held on to it from emancipation through the Civil Rights era.

The story began in 1844, when North Carolina planter Paul Cameron bought 1,600 acres near Greensboro, Alabama, and sent out 114 enslaved people to cultivate cotton and enlarge his fortune. In the 1870s, he sold the plantation to emancipated black families who worked there. Drawing on thousands of letters from the planter and on interviews with descendants of those who bought the land, Nathans unravels how and why the planter s former laborers purchased the site of their enslavement, kept its name as Cameron Place, and defended their homeland against challengers from the Jim Crow era to the present day.

Through the prism of a single plantation and the destiny of black families that dwelt on it for over a century and a half, A Mind to Stay brings to life a vivid cast of characters and illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. Those who remained fought to make their lives fully free for themselves, for their neighbors, and for those who might someday return.

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Genres: History, African American

313 pages, Hardcover

Published February 20, 2017

Reviews

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sydney Nathans is a gifted storyteller. The first three sections of this book, based largely on paper records—many of them archived in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—provide a fascinating, if sobering, view of Black Belt agriculture from the antebellum period to the turn of the 20th century. It is bracing to remember that slave owners too often derived little but emotional and financial frustration from their ownership of others’ lives and labors.

The last section of the book, grounded in Nathans’ almost forty years of oral history interviews with contemporary residents of the old Cameron lands, is less satisfying. Nathans wants to celebrate black “landedness,” the decision of the descendants of enslaved people to stick it out on lands painfully purchased after Reconstruction from the white absentee owner. But by book’s end, other readers may feel, as I did, that if the ancestors of these folks had exercised more initiative and left for Chicago or California, their lives would have been enriched, and they might have provided their descendents with greater opportunities.

[Cam's Corner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sydney Nathans’ A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland tells the story of former enslaved people owning and maintaining land for generations. However- that’s not how the book begins. This book is broken into two halves; we start the first half with the history of the plantation, the owners, slavery, the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction. In the second half, we dive deeper into the personal Black family histories of the land, the middle and conclusion of Reconstruction, discuss the first wave of the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and participation of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement. It is important to have these family focused, micro-histories because they provide us with a not generalized insight on Black experience in the South post slavery and Reconstrution.