Week 3 Guiding Questions (Haywood)

Here I’ll give you the prof guide for the exam.

• Please choose one of the guiding questions from this week, and do your best to respond to it.
• You should then choose a term that you found interesting OR that you feel you still don’t understand. Do your best to define the term, using quotations from the reading but primarily through your own paraphrasing.
• End the post by posing a question to your peers.

Week 3 Guiding Questions (Haywood)

1. What is the Black Belt? Why does Haywood believe that understanding it geographically and culturally is important?
2. What is Haywood’s claim about the Black Belt and the concept of a Black nation? How does Haywood understand the concept of a “nation?”
3. Why does Haywood say the thesis of the Black Belt is still applicable in spite of the Great Migration?
4. What is Haywood’s claim about the plantation system in America? Who does he say profits off this specifically? What is the economic structure of a plantation economy?
5. How does Haywood claim the North profited economically from the collapse of the plantation system? How does the “Bourbon class” work together with Northern elites in order to oppress Black people in the South?
6. What is monopoly capitalism? Why is this economic structure important to understanding American economics and imperialism?
7. How does the plantation system continue at the time Haywood is writing, both economically and socially? Why does he understand this as imperialism?
8. What role does Haywood say banks play in the creation of a new plantation economy? How is the lien system connected to the history of slavery?
9. What impact did Jim Crow laws and the changing landscape of labor activism (agrarian movements) have on the development of the plantation economy and anti-Black racism in the South?
10. How does Haywood say Black farmers were uniquely harmed by the collapse of the agricultural industry? How were the government programs inadequate to help them ?