Tag: Dorothea Lange

In this diary, we address more directly what I’ve mostly skirted around in this New Deal series – something I’m completely unqualified to talk about.  That being race relations in the South.  I know it’s a cheap shot to give a diary this potentially misleading title, but I couldn’t resist.  STFU stands for Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which organization this diary will come around to after some introduction.

     

     Delta Cooperative Farm, Hillhouse, Mississippi, July 4, 1936

     (Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration)

STFU was an important progressive organization in its day.  I’ve come across the argument that it was a key precursor to the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s.  There’s probably something to that.

It’s been awhile since my last entry in my series on the New Deal.  I’ve dipped into the motherlode of picture archives – the FSA pix from the Library of Congress, and got lost amongst the rich legacy therein for a time.  Starting with Dorothea Lange, with some 4000 entries.  This picture of hers is one of the most iconic from the period:

A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?  And everyone thinks they know what this picture’s about.  But consider the caption that goes with:

Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Destitute in pea picker’s camp, Nipomo, California, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the twenty-five hundred people in this camp most of them were destitute.

Permanently changed my understanding of the picture.  Throughout the diary, text in italics is direct quotes from the photographers notes

Cross-posted from Daily Kos