BOOK REVIEW: A Powerful Chronicle of Black Resilience in Holmes County, MS
Written by SP Editor
Mike Miller. Social Policy. February, 2026.
Review of Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi.
Holmes County holds a special spot in the heart of many veterans of the mid-1960s civil rights movement. It combined large Delta cotton plantations and foothill small farms, a substantial number of them owned by Blacks. It was the place where the New Deal’s short-lived Farm Security Administration (killed by the Department of Agriculture and Southern Dixiecrats) created and funded a Black small farmer cooperative in Milestone that managed to survive into the 1960s and beyond. As the Mississippi Encyclopedia reports (2017):
By 1943 the community boasted a farming cooperative, a new and fully appointed public high school, and a health clinic staffed by a community nurse. The farm families received training from the FSA on matters of nutrition, planning, and home management. Today, roughly six thousand acres of the original land is still owned by families of the early project participants…
The connection between land, the democratic process, and citizenship was so powerful in Milestone that Hartman Turnbow, Ozell Mitchell, Ralthus Hayes, Rev. Jesse James Russell, and Alma Carnegie—individuals who had little more than land—aggressively demanded their rights despite the risks they knew that entailed.
Organizers and activists recognized the power as well. Inspired by Mileston, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and other leaders dreamed of larger visions of land reform. Mileston farmers built one of the first community centers used for citizenship classes in Mississippi, formed one of the strongest chapters of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and ultimately led the way in the election of Robert Clark to the Mississippi legislature in 1967.
Hartman Turnbow
When legendary Hartman Turnbow’s home was encircled and fire-bombed by white Ku Klux Klansmen, he came out with guns blazing—reputedly killing at least one of the KKKers (a fact kept out of the media because racist whites didn’t want to admit this defeat) and saving his family in the process.
That wasn’t exactly the nonviolence “The Movement” proclaimed, but no-one I knew in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (“Snick”) repudiated it nor criticized him for it. In fact, for many SNCC staff self-defense comfortably co-existed with nonviolence in their strategic view of how to organize in the South.
I met Turnbow when I was an SNCC field secretary during the summer of 1963. His Deep South Black accent combined with a poetic and musical way of speaking that forced a northern listener like me to concentrate on every word.
On one occasion, he and other Milestone Black farmers held the sheriff and his deputies to a stand-off, both sides holding rifles at-the-ready to fire in a contested effort by Blacks to register to vote in County seat Lexington.
Author Diane T. Feldman
The book’s author was for 30 years business partner of Ivanhoe Donaldson, one of SNCC’s leading field secretaries and a thoughtful observer of the Deep South scene and organizing within it. In addition, she dove deeply into the material beginning in colonial times and carefully moving forward. She dug into archives, interviewed key people and paid attention both to details and the big picture.
Her writing is clear, the stories she tells are often richly rewarding and her analytic framework pays attention to organizing, politics and economics—all necessary to understand the fate of the Deep South struggle by Blacks for freedom and justice.
I found one major weakness in her account—a failure to integrate the politics and economics of the mid-1960s into the 1970s and thereafter.
The Book -- Early Years
Feldman begins in pre-European arrival and settlement times when Choctaw, Chakhiuma, Chickasaw peopled what became Holmes County and its region long before the arrival of European settlers, and traces Spanish, French and English arrivals. The Europeans deployed classic divide and conquer strategies. During the Spanish conquest, settlement by other Europeans, and War of Independence, the Natives sided with different groups, a division that persisted into the Civil War period. Treaties made with them were routinely broken. Leaders were killed. Most were expelled and ended up in Oklahoma. A smaller number remained; their heirs still have a presence in the region. When cotton entered the Mississippi economy in the early 1800s, Black slaves did as well. They replaced Native workers in the economy creating a lasting division between the two peoples.
The Civil War, Reconstruction and “Redemption and Conservative Conquest”
Holmes County slaves joined the Union Army, and played an important role in the Third Colored Cavalry. As elsewhere in the South, the North’s victory brought hope to freed slaves. Feldman tells us:
During the period of Radical Reconstruction, Holmes County had African American state legislators, supervisors, and sheriffs…They were a remarkable group of leaders who began organizing themselves immediately after the war with help from African-Americans from the North, mostly sponsored by the African Methodist Episcopal Church…Baptist churches were also active….
Union Leagues were formed before and during the Civil War as alliances of Northern Abolitionists and freed northern Blacks, and became post-war vehicles for an alliance between freed slaves and anti-slavery whites—few whites there supported Black liberation. Reconstruction was defeated until World War II by the return to power of what historian Douglass Blackmon aptly calls “slavery by another name.”.
Borrowed Land carefully takes us through the Holmes County consequences of southern “redemption.” Initially, before white power’s iron rule could be fully implemented, alliances of disenfranchised Black and White small farmers and northern Republicans who had moved south, fought against expropriation of Black-owned land. Their struggle was in vain. The Holmes County Black sheriff died in peculiar circumstances, probably assassinated. So did other Blacks elected to office or playing leadership roles.
For a period, there was contestation with the return of White dominance. In one case, conservative whites nominated a Black to run for office. In another, a “fusion candidate” ran with poor white, disenfranchised Black and Greenback Party support. But the fragile Black-White coalition collapsed. As the book summarizes:
For a brief time, the all-White Southern Alliance and the Colored Farmers’ Alliance shared cooperative stores to help small farms throughout the county. That effort, too, would end when most leaders of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance were killed.
Usually, the kind of detail found in Feldman’s book is found in narrow-scope case studies. She manages to combine a sweeping coverage of one county with fine detail. The book was brim full of new discoveries for me.
A New Century: 1900 – 1950
By 1900, pre-Civil war conditions were largely in place throughout the old Confederacy, including Holmes County. There was one important exception: “The first half of the twentieth century is not only a story of oppression but also of courage in Black agency and activism.” A remarkable number fought to achieve land ownership and self-sufficiency. “In Holmes County, African Americans founded [the Church of God in Christ-COGIC] that was to reach worldwide renown…financed their own schools, built their own businesses, and played a seminal role in a national organization of African-American farmers.” The COGIC story alone makes invaluable reading in the book.
Despite severe economic difficulties compounded by the boll weevil, Holmes County Black farmers managed to carve out a place for themselves. Assisted by the National Federation of Colored Farmers and the Marcus Garvey separatist movement, they successfully pursued land ownership and cooperative marketing, created regional banks and otherwise supported each other. By 1940, despite the Great Depression, “Today, nearly all of them are farm owners.” Initial New Deal programs helped land owners (mostly white), but not sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who “didn’t fare so well.” That fault was corrected resulting in “considerable material benefits to tenant farmers—particularly in Holmes County, where, with New Deal help, they were responsible for founding the Milestone Co-op. It played a significant role in the 1960s civil rights movement.” Holmes became one of the most substantial Black land-owning counties in the state.
Feldman’s mastery of detail takes the reader through the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education school desegregation case and the segregationist reaction it prompted. Her Holmes County focus adds local detail to the racism that then was rampant throughout the south.
The book’s single but important weakness is a failure to deeply connect the economics and politics of the 1960s “movement” period in Mississippi as a whole and Holmes County in particular with the national Democrats successful strategy to coopt The Movement while isolating those who weren’t seduced.
The book hails the Child Development Group in Mississippi (CDGM), the early Mississippi head start program. No doubt it was an excellent early childhood development program until Dixiecrat pressure on the War on Poverty (OEO) replaced it because it was serving as a base of operations for full time staff who worked with the local community. “Tom Levin, the northern academic and former summer volunteer whose concepts were central to CDGM, advocated for Head Start with SNCC. He argued that the preschools could become community centers that would be central to organizing efforts.” That was a flaw: Federal money in Mississippi was not going to fund or otherwise be a base for radical economic reform leadership. “The local Holmes County movement fully embraced Head Start and its potential for the community (emphasis added) as well as its children.”
Feldman accepts War on Poverty claims: “Community engagement was part of the programmatic philosophy at the OEO…At its core was the Community Action Program that sought to develop neighborhood and community-based solutions to problems.” Not when they called for Black farm ownership or Black-run cooperatives. Or, for that matter, not when they supported the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
“CDGM,” Feldman reports, “closed at the end of 1967, and a rival group without the same depth of connection to the civil rights movement became the recipient of Head Start funds.” True enough. But only a partial truth. The national Democratic Party was determined to undermine independent Black political activity in whatever form it took. It succeeded.
By 1968, the independent Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which had mounted an unsuccessful but nationally televised challenge to the seating of the State’s racist delegation at the Party’s 1964 Convention, had been relegated to one-quarter of the State’s delegation—one free of the racists to be sure, but also free of people who not only vigorously supported political rights and federal intervention to protect them (including challenging gerrymandering), but who also supported economic justice that included Black land ownership and cooperatives. This Democratic Party, unlike the best of its Depression era predecessor, was not about to support a repeat of the Depression-era federally-funded Mileston Black cooperative.
In her concluding chapter, “The Second Redemption (“Redemption” was the slogan of Whites who fought and defeated Reconstruction)—1960 To Present,” Feldman powerfully describes what happened: “African-Americans regained their right to fully participate in civic life because of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Immediately following, many lost their land and the economic independence it brought them. The latter half of the twentieth century was, in effect, a second period of redemption, but this time land and economic vitality rather than political rights were ‘redeemed’.”
Political rights without political power are forms without substance. Borrowed Land is explicit about the loss of Black land ownership and government responsibility for it: “The Federal government bears considerable responsibility for the loss of African American land…it has not sided with African-Americans on land ownership.”
Feldman is clear about what happened in Holmes County (and throughout the cotton growing south): “Modernization [as a positive] leaves out what it did to the land itself, which has not recovered. Second, white leadership wanted African Americans to leave, motivated at least in part by a desire to regain political control. Third is that while modernization and mechanization are central to Delta history, discriminatory policies forced many African American farmers out of business.”
The connections that led to this result are blurred in this otherwise fine and important book’s pages. One final example: “By the 1960s, there was less demand for labor and greater concern over African American political empowerment if the Black majority in places like Holmes County remained.”
Conclusion
Borrowed Land is filled with political and economic lessons for people struggling to achieve justice in both areas. The post-World War II, and especially post mid-1960s, failure of Democrats to seriously connect economic justice with political power is one of the important reasons for the present state of the nation.
The Author
Mike Miller was an SNCC “field secretary” from late 1962 to the end of 1966 and worked in the Mississippi Delta during the Summer of 1963; directed a Saul Alinsky community organizing project in Kansas City, MO; and spent the rest of his life engaged with community organizing. He directs ORGANIZE Training Center.
