Depression Photos ~ The Thirties

Courtesy of American Memory, Library of Congress
  1. Uncle George's blacksmith and carpentry shop. He has been on the plantation for fifty years. Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi. [1939]
  2. Day laborers picking cotton, near Clarksdale, Miss. [1939]
  3. Backyard of Negro tenant's home, Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Miss. Delta [1939]
  4. Negroes fishing in creek near cotton plantations outside Belzoni, Miss. Delta [1939]
  5. Corner of kitchen of apartment rented to Negroes. Chicago, Illinois. [1941]
  6. Canning plant employees grading beans, Dania, Fla. [1937]
  7. Migratory labor digging potatoes, season very bad, market poor, left potatoes in ground as long as possible, hoping for rise in prices. Often not worth digging, left to rot in ground. Near Homestead, Florida. [1939]
  8. Vegetable workers, migrants, waiting after work to be paid. Near Homestead, Florida [1939]
  9. A Negro church in a corn [i.e., cotton] field, Manning, S.C. [1939]
  10. Negro attendant watering chickens at South Louisiana State Fair. Donaldsonville, Louisiana. [1938]
  11. Alabama tenant farmer near Anniston, Alabama. [1936]
  12. Negro quarters. Vicksburg, Mississippi. [1936]
  13. Seed store interior. Vicksburg, Mississippi [1936]
  14. Negro woman carrying her shoes home from church. Mississippi Delta [1936]
  15. The beginning of an educational program at the newly-started Hill House cooperative experiment. Mississippi. [1936]
  16. Cotton merchants with cotton lint on suits in Memphis cotton exchange, Tennessee. [1939]
  17. Negro farmer who has brought his cotton samples to town discusses price with cotton buyer. Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi. [1939]
  18. Negro quarter, Natchez, Mississippi. The home of a Negro family with a Negro man and a woman looking out a window. [1935]
  19. Compton, Negro sharecropper, and his wife stripping and grading tobacco. He has a Negro landlord who lives in Mebane, part of a very prosperous Negro settlement. Near Carr, North Carolina. [1939]
  20. Attractive Negro homes in a better Negro district, Newport News, Virginia. [1936]
  21. White and blacks solve problems together on the Sherwood Eddy cotton cooperative of Hill House, Mississippi. [1936]
  22. Cotton. Coahoma County, Mississippi [1937]
  23. Lunchtime for cotton hoers. Mississippi Delta. [1937]
  24. Typical of better home once owned by white people, but for past ten years owned by Negro woman who hasn't money to keep it repaired. Monticello Road, near Columbia, South Carolina. [1938]
  25. Negro and White Man Sitting on Curb talking, Muskogee, Oklahoma. [1939]
  26. "Colored Entrance" of Movie House, Mississippi, 1939
  27. African American School House near Summerville, South Carolina, 1938
  28. "Secondhand clothing stores and pawn shop on Beale Street."[Sign: "Hotel Clark, The Best Service for Colored Only."] [1939]
  29. "A fish restaurant for Negroes in the section of the city where cotton hoers are recruited." [Sign: "Bryant's Place Hot Fish for Colored."] [1937]
  30. "A drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn." [Sign: "Colored."] [1938]
  31. "Sign on a restaurant." [Sign: "We Cater to White Trade only."] [1938]
  32. Part of the daily lineup outside the State Employment Service Office. Memphis, Tennessee. June 1938.