Agriculture, Advertisement, and Black Labor After Slavery

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This advertisement for Williams & Clark Fertilizer Company (dated 1891) associates racialized labor with the other commodities that fertilizer can help produce: crops. The depiction of an idyllic, presumably plantation, context upholds a vision of white superiority, which it took even more effort to maintain against the contradiction posed by the end of slavery. The image plays off of the informal or extralegal subjugation and exploitation of black labor during Reconstruction and Jim Crow that helped create the racial inequality of labor that exists today. The image’s main idea is that even if slavery is no longer in place, black labor has not really gone anywhere and can still be all but enslaved and it capitalizes ideologically on this fact. Therefore, the implied viewer or presumed customer is unquestionably white, and the depiction of black laborers working in a cotton field reenacts the position of the master for the person consuming the image. By purchasing the product, it is hinted that you own the land and the crops, or that you can feel like, and symbolically be, a master. This effect would operate just as much if the viewer was a poor white man and not an owner of property at all, which leads me to associate it with the pacification of the white working class through anti-black ideology that Roediger ascribes to minstrelsy.

I was also struck by the effect of the specific crops associated with this fertilizer. There are five crops present in the image—corn, potatoes, wheat, and tobacco and cotton—which, presumably, all can benefit from the use of fertilizer. However, only tobacco and cotton carry seriously loaded meanings. Not only are there black people (contrasted with buildings that evoke a plantation house in the background) picking cotton in the center portrait, but the two fertilizer bags in the right bottom corner closely associate the fertilizer with tobacco and cotton, more so than any of the food crops shown. To support the myth that the product can, so to speak, make “your wildest dreams come true,” as is the goal of advertisement, this fertilizer company exploits black labor symbolically in a way that relies on but also works retroactively to justify and support the real economic exploitation of black people at the time.