Taylor M. Polites: Cotton Croppers

I’ve continued my research on Alabama in the 1930’s. One study from 1935 is called The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy. It was the result of studies and surveys conducted by the University of North Carolina from 1933-1935 to assess the state of cotton cultivation in the Deep South during that time.

In the ten chief cotton states, more than 60% of cotton producers were tenants on operations of various sizes. Most of these tenants were sharecroppers who received seed, fertilizer, tools and work animals from the land owner in exchange for half of the crop they produced. The cropper was also provided housing and “furnishing”, advances of food and other necessities from the landlord until the cotton crop came in, often at usurious rates of interest. This was the “most dependent and vulnerable” population. There were approximately 1.1 million white cropper families in the mid-1930’s in the South and 700,000 black cropper families.

The report decried the poor quality of housing, diet and education of the sharecropper class. The social system that existed in landlord-tenant cotton culture was (at its most benign) a paternalistic one that replicated the culture of slavery days. “Every kind of exploitation and abuse is permitted because of the old caste prejudice. The poor white connives in this abuse of the Negro; in fact, he is the most violent protagonist of it.” And later: “Because of their insistence upon the degrading of three million Negro tenants, five and a half million white workers continue to keep themselves in virtual peonage.”

It is a harsh indictment that certainly merits qualification, but remains representative of the complex currents of power and race that still echoed in Southern society 70 years after the end of the Civil War.

Here are some pictures of the world of the cotton farmer in Depression-era Alabama from the Library of Congress (captions are taken from the LOC).

Martha Mosely coming from the store. She manages and runs her own farm and made three bales
of cotton last year. Gee's Bend, Alabama. May 1939. Marion Post Wolcott.
Library of Congress (U.S. Farm Security Administration)

Plowboy in Alabama earns seventy-five cents daily.
Library of Congress (U.S. Farm Security Administration)

Alabama Negro working in the field near Eutaw, Alabama.
Library of Congress (U.S. Farm Security Administration)

Alabama plow girl near Eutaw, Alabama.
Library of Congress (U.S. Farm Security Administration)

A Negro tenant farmer and several members of his family hoeing cotton on their
farm in Alabama. July 1936. Dorothea Lange.
Library of Congress (U.S. Farm Security Administration)