Migrant workers of the American South
The stark lives of sharecroppers in the Great Depression
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1939-1941
After the abolition of slavery in the United States, sharecropping emerged as a system of agricultural labor in the South.Under this system, a landowner would provide land, tools and housing to sharecroppers, who would work the land and receive a share of the crop come harvest time. In the meantime, the sharecropper would buy food and supplies from a merchant on credit. When the harvest came in, the sharecropper would sell his share of the crop to the merchant to pay off his debt. In the best cases, sharecroppers could barely scrape by. With fickle harvests and lopsided contracts, they ended up deeply indebted to the merchant or landlord and tied to the land, leading to the system being called “slavery by another name."Other agricultural workers were migratory, going wherever there were crops to be grown as the seasons changed. Living conditions were dismal, and only became worse in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains.By the late 1930s, there were about 300,000 migrant workers roaming the country in search of employment. Black migrants were particularly hard-pressed as a result of the popular sentiment that solving white unemployment should take precedence over black unemployment.Migrant workers had little government protection and were isolated from the communities they traveled through. Most of the New Deal legislation that benefited industrial workers did little for itinerant farmers. One government agency that did help was the Farm Security Administration. Initially called the Resettlement Administration, the FSA set up camps for workers with improved amenities and education for families, offering a modicum of comfort in a hard, dusty life.
