Cooperative demonstration work began in Texas in 1903 as an 
effort to teach farmers new methods of crop cultivation and 
management. However, black farmers in Texas were excluded 
from demonstration work until the Smith-Lever Agricultural 
Extension Act in 1914.

    By World War I, the resulting Negro Division included a 
complicated bureaucracy of African American agents who 
reported to white officials, were supervised by black administrators, 
and served black farmers. The measurable successes of these 
African American farmers exacerbated racial tensions and led to 
pressure on agents to maintain the racial status quo.

    In Reaping a Greater Harvest, Reid deftly spotlights further 
hierarchies of class and gender within the extension service. Her 
analysis clearly demonstrates how the same system that enabled 
the agents and the farmers they served to wield some political 
influence also kept them dependent on a racialized state that 
systematically discriminated against them and maintained the 
white-dominated southern landscape.

    Historians of race, gender, and class will join agricultural 
historians in valuing this careful examination of an understudied 
development in a corner of the Jim Crow South.

_________________________________________________________

DEBRA A. REID is associate professor of history at Eastern 
Illinois University in Charleston. Her Ph.D. is from Texas A&M 
University.


Number Fourteen: Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by 
Texas A&M University–Commerce