This was a result of increased mechanization, which brought with it an increase in the average size of farms. Within time, the family-run properties were swallowed into huge agricultural interests, and the (usually black) tenant farmers and sharecroppers who lived on those family farms found themselves out of a home and a job.
Paradoxically, the civil rights movement also hastened the end of agricultural employment for black workers. As A Gathering of Old Men demonstrates, a kind of paternalism often existed between black laborers and a white landowner; Candy Marshall, the young white woman who organizes the bizarre obstruction of justice in Gaines's novel, is the epitome of such an employer. The tensions that surface between her and the black laborers, to whom she refers as "her" people, demonstrate that this type of landownerlaborer relationship, even when it involved people of good will who liked and respected each other, promoted a strong sense of white superiority. While the empowerment of black laborers and the granting to them of improved civil rights made them less dependent upon the good will of their white employers, it seems also to have made interracial relations less close and personal in many ways.
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