Great Depression and New Deal Primary Sources | Katharine DuPre Lumpkin and Dorothy Wolff Douglas

Excerpt from Child Workers in America
Published in 1937

"Tom gets up, or is pulled out of bed, at 4 o'clock in summer, by his older brother, who is quicker than he to hear the landlord's bell."

From Child Workers in America

Before the American Civil War (1861–65), most black Americans worked and lived as slaves on plantations and farms in the Southern states. At the conclusion of the war, black Americans were freed from slavery but had no money to purchase their own farmland. White landowners still needed stable, low-cost laborers to work the land, so they devised a new farming system in which they divided their land into sections and assigned a family to work each section. These families were called sharecroppers because at harvest they had to share part of their crop, generally half, with the landowner. The shared crop...