Migrant Worker During the Great Depression by Dorothea Lange

Fall 2020

For the Women in the Visual Arts Course at Arizona State University

The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1939, was the result of an economic (stock market crash, etc.) and natural downfall (Dust Bowl, tornados, drought, flooding, etc.). Many people lost their jobs and their homes. As a result, many people living in the rural areas moved north or west, usually into cities. The government, under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, created the New Deal - a series of agencies and programs aimed at helping to stop and recover from these downfalls. One such agency was the Resettlement Agency (RA), founded in 1935, that was replaced with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) a few years later. Their main purpose was “to build relief camps and offer loans and relocation assistance to farmers impacted by the Depression and the Dust Bowl.” This wasn’t cheap, so “To justify the need for those projects, the government employed photographers to document the suffering of those affected and publish the pictures.”

These photographers created the first known published documentary photos of any major event. Roy Stryker, head of this new photography and information department, hired several photographers including one of two women photographers in the FSA, Dorothea Lange. The FSA division under Stryker “ultimately produced several hundred thousand photographs, until the project was abolished in 1942.” In fact, many of these photographs were seen in publications, such as Life and Time magazines, and inspired the book and movie The Grapes of Wrath.

Based in California, Lange photographed some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression, including “Migrant Mother” and some lesser known photographs, including “Migrant Worker during the Great Depression” (an African American man sitting under the shade of tree branches). She primarily photographed the migration of Oklahoma farmers from the Dust Bowl to the west, migrant workers in California, and farmers in the Southeast.

In the South, Lange saw some of the harshest conditions as racial inequality and segregation turned African American sharecroppers into day laborers (migrant workers), which was similar to the farming system she had seen in California. Lange noticed that “Florida in particular began to look like California.” The Jim Crow Laws and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 sped “up those tendencies: more and more southern farmland came into the hands of absentee corporations; plantations were expanding in size; and large efficiency-minded owners brought in tractors and wage laborers to replace mules and tenants.” This meant that African Americans were the most affected by the Depression, as they were the “last hired, first fired.” Their jobs were filled by whites who had fallen into hard times, and they were evicted, as whites took back their land. This instigated the Great Migration, where “by 1940 1.75 million African Americans moved from the South to cities in the north and west” looking for a better life and jobs, although they still suffered some of the same discriminations.

In the urban cities that many African Americans migrated to, they developed communities of their own. Over a short time, these communities came to be rundown, poor in quality with cramped living conditions, and eventually developed into violence, drugs, and a not-well-loved nightlife. Many African American families were hesitant about moving to these urban areas, but it was better than the conditions in rural areas, especially in the south. For those African Americans who chose to stay in the south, many of them became day laborers (migrant workers) like the one in the photograph, “Migrant Worker during the Great Depression.” Lange witnessed these African American migrant workers “waiting on urban street corners for work and in the truckloads of workers being ferried to and from distant fields.” Trying to get and hold onto jobs to survive during the Depression was already difficult, but to be an African American in the south when discrimination, racism, and segregation were still a part of public and social lives was even more difficult.

After 1935 and just prior to 1940, unions became more and more significant and useful as working conditions were horrible for many workers in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. African Americans could only really get the horrible, most of the time dangerous, and unskilled jobs that were not already taken by whites. Unions, at first only were focused on whites, but eventually came to realize that by including African Americans, could they actually get more accomplished. However, even the unions still had some aspect of segregation. Organizations and Unions, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and those focused on the welfare of African Americans began to form and fought back, which eventually led to the Civil Rights Movement. These organizations were not just solely focused on African Americans in cities, but also those working on farms as many of the earlier New Deal programs actually hurt African Americans livelihoods in both the city and on the farm.

If it was not for the photographs of the FSA photographers including Dorothea Lange, many of “the wealthy… and people in the eastern United States might have remained oblivious to the full reach and suffering of rural Americans.” But there was a catch. Stryker would provide his photographers with scripts, which they would not always follow. Also, some of their images would be cropped and captions would be edited to voice the desires of the FSA’s intention for the photographs. In fact, one of Lange’s captions was edited as such: “Old Negro-the kind the planters like. He hoes, picks cotton, and is full of good humor.” These would take the images out of context. After all the, the photographs were owned by the government.

But this was not the only major problem for Lange: “In the South she made dozens of compelling, close-up portraits of African Americans… She photographed African Americans with the same visual tropes she used with whites, representing them as equally hardy salt-of-the-earth farmers.” In fact, “31 percent of her total output” was of people of color. Lange’s photographs of African Americans were rarely published, as the FSA wanted to avoid showing discrimination, racism, and anti-racism. In other words, nothing that would harm the status-quo. FSA photographers could not even photograph blacks and whites in the same photograph, even though they did. This made it especially hard for those who documented and photographed the south, Lange included. They tended to ignore this though.

Lange, who was a professional photographer that liked control of her photographs and captions, continued to photograph suffering when the FSA wanted to show recovery, and along with the fact that Lange was not able to retain the rights of her photographs (as they were government owned), she fought against Stryker, which led to her dismissal from the FSA. In fact, many of her photographs are still unknown or rarely seen, including “Migrant Worker during the Great Depression”, as there were thousands of photographs taken during this time that are still sitting in government archives. In the end, the Great Depression saw a lot of suffering, but no persons were seen less and suffered more than those of African Americans during the Great Depression and Lange as an FSA photographer documented their hardships.

Bibliography

Gelber, Steven. Fall 1985. “The Eye of the Beholder: Images of California by Dorothea Lange & Russell Lee.” (University of California Press in association with the California Historical sociey) 64 (4): 264-271.

Gordon, Linda. 2006. “Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist.” The Journal of American History 93 (3): 698-727.

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. 2009. To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Klein, Christopher. 2018. Last Hired, First Fired: How the Great Depression Affected African Americans. Accessed 2020. https://www.history.com/news/last-hired-first-fired-how-the-great-depression-affected-african-americans#:~:text=During%20the%20Great%20Depression%2C%20hundreds%20of%20thousands%20of,South%20to%20cities%20in%20the%20North%20and%20West.

McDermott, Annette. 2020. How Photography Defined the Great Depression. Accessed 2020. https://www.history.com/news/how-photography-defined-the-great-depression.

McEuen, Melissa. 2000. “Portraitist as Documentarian: Dorothea Lange’s Depiction of American Individualism.” In In Seeing America: Women Photographers Between the Wars, 75-124. University Press of Kentucky.

Notes

1 McDermott, Annette. 2020. How Photography Defined the Great Depression. Accessed 2020. https://www.history.com/news/how-photography-defined-the-great-depression.

2 Ibid., https://www.history.com/news/how-photography-defined-the-great-depression.

3 Gordon, Linda. 2006. “Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist.” The Journal of American History 93 (3): 698-727. p. 703

4 Ibid., p. 717

5 Ibid., p. 718

6 McDermott, Annette. 2020. How Photography Defined the Great Depression. Accessed 2020. https://www.history.com/news/how-photography-defined-the-great-depression.

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. 2009. To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

7 Klein, Christopher. 2018. Last Hired, First Fired: How the Great Depression Affected African Americans. Accessed 2020. https://www.history.com/news/last-hired-first-fired-how-the-great-depression-affected-african-americans#:~:text=During%20the%20Great%20Depression%2C%20hundreds%20of%20thousands%20of,South%20to%20cities%20in%20the%20North%20and%20West.

8 Gordon, Linda. 2006. “Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist.” The Journal of American History 93 (3): 698-727. p. 717

9 McDermott, Annette. 2020. How Photography Defined the Great Depression. Accessed 2020. https://www.history.com/news/how-photography-defined-the-great-depression.

10 Gordon, Linda. 2006. “Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist.” The Journal of American History 93 (3): 698-727. p. 719

11 ibid., p. 722

12 Ibid., p. 721