The Great Depression upended many American livelihoods and caused dramatic shifts in population sizes -- particularly among African-Americans. This is what that looked like.
Sharecropper in Little Rock, Arkansas, October 1935.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Laborers carrying and laying railroad ties for a spur line into a coal storage space for the federal government.Library of Congress Cotton hoer, New Madrid County, Missouri.Library of Congress Child in Hill House, Mississippi.Library of Congress Cotton pickers, who worked for 60 cents a day, in Pulaski County, Arkansas, October 1935.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Untitled photo, beleived to be the son of tenant farmer on a farm near Greensboro, Alabama. Library of Congress Farmers gather around a portable cane mill in Orange County, North Carolina. Library of Congress Resting the mules, which get too hot when the cotton is high in mid-summer cultivation, at King and Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi, August 1940.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Cotton hoers work from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. for $1 near Clarksdale, Mississippi, June-July 1937.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Picking cotton, Lake Dick Project, Arkansas, September 1938.Russell Lee/New York Public Library People look out the window in the black quarter of Natchez, Mississippi.Library of Congress Interior of a camp meant for 1937 flood refugees in Forrest City, Arkansas.Library of Congress During the church service at a black church in Heard County, Georgia, April 1941.New York Public Library Picnic at Beaufort, South Carolina, July 1939.New York Public Library Earl M. Qualls, a car dumper operator at Watts Bar as well as a job steward of the Hod Carriers' local union on TVAuthority, was active in combatting absenteeism and in furthering war bond Red Cross drives.Library of Congress Ruth Miller works in the El Segundo Plant of the Douglas Aircraft Company.Library of Congress Women being transported from Memphis, Tennessee to an Arkansas plantation, July 1937.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Man making a purchase at traveling general store near Forrest City, Arkansas, September 1938.Russell Lee/New York Public Library King and Anderson Plantation. Clarksdale, Mississippi, August 1940.New York Public Library Mother teaching children numbers and alphabet in the home of sharecropper, Transylvania, Louisiana, January 1939.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Mulatto ex-slave in her house near Greensboro, Alabama, May 1941.New York Public Library Cotton hoer near Clarksdale, Mississippi, June 1937.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Vegetable pickers and migrants waiting after work to be paid near Homestead, Florida, February 1939.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Skimming the boiling cane juice to make sorghum syrup at cane mill near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina, September 1939.New York Public Library Children of sharecropper, near West Memphis, Arkansas, 1935.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Laborers sit in front of a fire on a Saturday night in the black quarter of Belle Glade, Florida, February 1941.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Wife and children of a black tenant farmer, Tupelo, Mississippi, August 1935.New York Public Library African-Americans in a bunkhouse in strawberry fields near Hammond, Louisiana, April 1939.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Allen Plantation, operated by Natchitoches Farmstead Association, a cooperative established through the cooperation of FSA, Louisiana, August 1940.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Washington, D.C.Library of Congress Blind street musicians, West Memphis, Arkansas, September 1935.New York Public Library Easter procession outside traditionally black church, Chicago, Ill.Library of Congress Man plays violin in New York City apartment.Library of Congress Boys in southwest Washington D.C.Library of Congress Children play in a Chicago park.Library of Congress Family in subdivision, Franklin Township, near Lincoln Highway, Bound Brook, New Jersey.Library of Congress Family in subdivision, Franklin Township, near Lincoln Highway, Bound Brook, New Jersey.Library of Congress Family in subdivision, Franklin Township, near Lincoln Highway, Bound Brook, New Jersey.Library of Congress Shoeshine, 47th Street, Chicago.Library of Congress A line to see the movies in Chicago, April 1941.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Family living in crowded quarters, Chicago, April 1941.Russell Lee/New York Public Library The bar at Palm Tavern, a predominately black restaurant on 47th Street in Chicago, April 1941.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Day laborers brought in by truck from nearby towns, waiting to be paid off and buy supplies, for cotton picking inside plantation store at Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi, October 1939.Russell Lee/New York Public Library Members of the Moors, a religious group in Chicago.New York Public Library Kitchen in the South Side of Chicago, April 1941.Russell Lee/New York Public Library
Photos Of The Great Depression’s Forgotten Black Victims View GalleryThe Great Depression dealt a devastating blow to just about everyone in the United States, but African-Americans felt the sting more than most.
As author Cheryl Lynn Greenberg writes in To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression, while Depression-era experiences of black workers hinged on factors such as region, age, and education level, most “followed a similarly troubling path.”
"Troubling" may be too light a word to describe what black workers faced. Wages and property values plunged as unemployment and land seizures soared. In Memphis, for example, African-Americans comprised a third of the total population, but 75 percent of the city’s unemployed. By 1934 in Atlanta, 70 percent of the black population didn’t have a job.
What work was available would typically go to white job seekers, who in hard times began to take, if not demand, jobs that traditionally went to black workers.
As Greenberg writes of the situation in the South, “only the lowest jobs were available to them, but now they were often the last in line even there. Across the South, groups of armed white workers threatened and intimidated employers who hired African Americans, arguing that they must hire the white unemployed first.“
White agitation for work led to the increased incidence of racial violence, specifically lynchings. As Hilton Butler wrote in The Nation, “Dust had been blown from the shotgun, the whip and the noose, and Ku Klux practices were being resumed in the certainty that dead men not only tell no tales by create vacancies.”
Before falling wages and vanishing employment, many African-Americans looked elsewhere for opportunity — particularly in urban areas, be they up north or elsewhere in the south. Indeed, by the end of the Depression, one-third of African-Americans in the South and almost two-thirds of the national African-American population lived in cities.
This, too, came with consequences. As more African-Americans moved into cities, Greenberg writes, they “pressed into already crowded black neighborhoods, deepening poverty and adding competition to scarce work.”
Photographers from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documented the transitions, struggles, fear, and hope that comprised this epoch of American life (see the gallery above). A fruit of the New Deal, the federal government established the FSA in an attempt to combat rural poverty as climatic crises and economic depressions upended rural life and pushed rural residents from their homes and into uncertain territory.
By sending photographers out to document these skirmishes, the program’s creators believed it could showcase a need to provide relief and rehabilitation to rural regions — and that the FSA was the way to go about it.
The choice of photography was a prudent one. As cultural historian Warren Susman wrote, "the shift to a culture of sight and sound was of profound importance; it increased our self-awareness as a culture; it helped create unity of response and action not previously possible; it made us more susceptible than ever to those who would mold culture and thought."
Over the course of its nearly ten-year life, the FSA photography program resulted in nearly 80,000 photographic prints, which historians credit with putting a face -- or rather, a multitude of faces -- on one of the most devastating periods in American history.
Next, learn about the fate of Soul City, a 1970s black-planned utopian society in the South. Then, have a look at 24 of the most stark and moving Great Depression photos.
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