Skip to main content

Sharecroppers, Greene County

View
@ New Georgia Encyclopedia

Lange, Dorothea

Description

Image of cotton sharecroppers in working in Greene County, Georgia, 1937. An African American man and woman hold hoes and stand in a field. They wear hats. Their clothes are ragged and torn.The Great Depression did not end in Georgia until the United States entered World War II in 1941. Conditions were harsh for blacks, whose entanglement in the sharecropping system dated back to the end of the Reconstruction era. While some still owned their own farms in the 1920s, many were forced off their land entirely by declining prices and into menial jobs in towns and cities. Others took the now-familiar path of migrating to urban areas in the state or industrial centers in the North, often joining relatives who had migrated during the mid-1910s. By 1935 just 12 percent of blacks owned the land they worked.
Type:
Image
View Original At:

Record Contributed By

New Georgia Encyclopedia

Record Harvested From

Digital Library of Georgia