The Deep South In The 1930s: Remarkable Colour Photographs Capture Daily Life Of African-American Labourers (Photo Essay)

Boys fishing in a bayou in Schriever, Louisiana

 Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott's amazing colour photos depict the poverty and deprivation of life in the Deep South in the 1930s and early 1940s

By Daily Mail Reporter

It was viewed as the 'benighted South' - an isolated part of America enduring the legacy of slavery, extreme poverty and the rise of small evangelical Protestant congregations in rural towns.

These incredible colour pictures depict the life of African-American tenant farmers and their families living in the Deep South in the 1930s and early 1940s - working on plantations, swimming in levees and sitting on their stoops.

They're the work of noted Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott, who documented poverty and deprivation during and after the Great Depression.

  

'As an FSA documentary photographer, I was committed to changing the attitudes of people by familiarising America with the plight of the underprivileged, especially in rural America.  FSA photographs shocked and aroused public opinion to increase support for the New Deal policies and projects, and played an important part in the social revolution of the 30s.'

- Marion Post Wolcott, according to a University of Virginia biographical sketch. 

The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division has preserved the original photographs, but have made them available on photosharing website Flickr since 2008.

The vivid collection of shots has attracted more than 10 million views, enabling viewers to tag and comment on pictures - what the library calls 'history detective' work.

A tenant's home beside the Mississippi River levee, near Lake Providence, Louisiana

Bayou Bourbeau plantation operated by Bayou Bourbeau Farmstead Association, a cooperative established through the cooperation of FSA, Natchitoches, LA

A store with live cat fish for sale near Natchitoches, Louisiana

Men fishing at a creek near cotton plantations outside Belzoni, Mississippi

A group of people - possibly a family - at the Bayou Bourbeau plantation, an FSA cooperative at Natchitoches, Louisiana

A cross roads store, bar, 'juke joint' and gas station in the cotton plantation area of Melrose, Louisiana

Day-labourers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Mississippi

An old tenant house with a mud chimney and cotton growing up to its door in Melrose, Louisiana

A group in transit, captured somewhere in Mississippi

 

Day labourers picking cotton near Clarksdale, Mississippi

Clothes of swimmers hanging on a telegraph pole in Lake Providence, Louisiana. The children from the nearby farms and neighborhoods often went swimming on the weekend

Children on the porch of a home at Marcella Plantation in Mileston, Mississippi

People walking at the Marcella Plantation in Mileston, Mississippi

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