Abstract
In 1913 Clarence Hamilton Poe, editor of the agricultural journal the Progressive Farmer, launched an unsuccessful campaign to segregate North Carolina's countryside. Poe was driven by the desire to help struggling white farmers, and he believed that the segregation of the countryside was necessary for these farmers to acquire land and build tightly knit rural communities. He had been introduced to the notion that the countryside could be segregated by Maurice Smethurst Evans, an influential white South African politician and author who had played an important role in shaping the pre- Apartheid system of segregation in South Africa. In exploring why Evans's ideas appealed to Poe, this essay illuminates the goals and international roots of rural segregationist ideology in the American South. Rural segregationist thinking, which historians have not yet fully engaged, was quite different from the strain of Jim Crow in circulation in cities.
