Eroding the Color Line: The Soil Conservation Service and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

"As a young graduate in agriculture from North Carolina A&T University in the depression year of 1938, John Maynard Jones had difficulty finding a job in his discipline. Teaching agriculture in high school was one possibility. Working for the state extension service was another possibility, since most of the extension services in the South hired black county agents on a segregated basis to work with black farmers. Indeed Jones knew these jobs existed because the county agent had occasionally visited the family farm near Bahama, North Carolina. As with many of the white farm children who went off to the land-grant college and earned a degree in agriculture, their first choice was not necessarily returning to the family farm. Upon finishing college Jones' first job was as the principal of a three-teacher school. During World War II, he worked at a hospital at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The hospital paid better than high school teaching. An announcement posted on the bulletin board prompted him to take the civil service exam for jobs in agriculture in the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

The Soil Conservation Service offices in Washington, D. C. and the regional office at Spartanburg, South Carolina, offered interviews. Preferring to stay in North Carolina, Jones took the initiative and contacted the state office of SCS in Raleigh. After an interview with Earl Garrett, the state conservationist in North Carolina, Jones began his career at the SCS office in Wadesboro, Anson County, North Carolina.

Jones thus became the first black professional 'soil conservationist' in North Carolina. He was one of a very small corps of black employees of the Soil Conservation Service in the South who worked with black farmers. This paper describes the first Blacks working in the Soil Conservation Service and examines the efforts in response to the Civil Right Act of 1964 to expand equal opportunities for employment as well as equal access of minority farmers to government programs."

Helms, Douglas. "Eroding the Color Line: The Soil Conservation Service and the Civil Rights Act of 1964," Agricultural History, Vol 65, No 2, (Spring 1991) 35-53.