Cotton on porch of a sharecropper's home, Maria plantation, Arkansas

Cotton on porch of a sharecropper's home, Maria plantation, Arkansas

Maria Plantation, Arkansas, Ben Shahn

Cotton sits on the porch of a sharecropper's home, waiting to be collected and sold by the White farm owner. Black sharecroppers grow and harvest cotton, then the White landowners take the cotton into town and sell it. After "calculating the debts" of the sharecropping family, the landowner gives them whatever money they earned from the harvest.

Ben Shahn

United States Farm Security Administration, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library

WCU, HIS 601/HON 451 Great Migration and Digital Storytelling, Spring 2016

c. October 1935

Erica Knorr

JPG

Still Image