An African-American tenant famer’s home in Mississippi. (Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, September 1939)
Two children play on the Marcella Plantation in Mississippi. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, September 1939)
Child day laborers are seen here picking cotton in Mississippi. (Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, September 1939)
Three figures walk on a lonely dirt road on the Marcella Plantation in Mississippi. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, September 1939)
Four people fish in a creek in rural Mississippi. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, October 1939.)
The home of African-American tenant farmers in Louisiana. (Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, 1940)
An African-American family poses on a porch in Louisiana. (Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, August 1940)
A close-up of the children gathered on a porch in Louisiana. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, August 1940)
Workers on the Bayou Bourbeau Plantation in Louisiana working cultivating what appears to be tobacco. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, August 1940)
A man leans against a battered storefront in Louisiana. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, July 1940)
Farm workers in the Southern U.S. pause for a respite. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, 1940)
A little baby looks on as adults chop cotton on rented land in Georgia. (Photo: Jack Delano, June 1941)
Men hang out at a juke joint near living quarters in Florida. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, February 1941.)
Children play outside migratory worker shacks in Florida. (Photo: Marion Post Wollcott, February 1941)
Popular web site BuzzFeed has discovered these remarkable photographs depicting life in the south for rural blacks working as sharecroppers on tenant farms. Shot between 1939 and 1941 by the Farm Security Administration, these images show the harsh living conditions of blacks farming on rented land during World War II.
Sharecropping was initially designed to get freed former slaves working again after the Civil War. Farming was essential to the stability of the southern economy, which had been decimated by the conflict. Tenant farming was instituted, because blacks were sorely needed in the fields yet seen as incapable of full ownership and management of lands.
From theGrio: Enslaved Africans’ sculptures brings slave history to life in Yonkers
What was sold as a fair method of supporting blacks as they make their first forays into the work economy devolved into what many have described as a new form of slavery. Blacks who worked as tenant farmers received access to land, seeds, and food for “free” with the promise that the owner would share the crops’ profits — minus the materials invested at the start of each season.
The dishonesty of landowners combined with the unstable nature of farming — in which weather, insects, and other factors could easily destroy crops — often landed black families trapped within this system of back-breaking work. Not only were many families unable to make a profit or save as sharecroppers; crooked accounting methods and bad luck often left these workers in debt to the landowners for the meager supplies they were forwarded in exchange for daily brutal labor.
Many scholars theorize that the poor living conditions endured on tenant farms was a major impetus for the Great Migration of African-Americans to the north during the 1940s. Viewing these photos, we can see the humanity that survived amid the crushing poverty that poor blacks experienced on tenant farms.
Follow Alexis Garrett Stodghill on Twitter at @lexisb
