Embed Notice

For the Black men and women whose ancestors had labored on this land, it was another kind of displacement, another blow to an already precarious existence. Southern whites, who had once worked relentlessly to keep Black labor tethered to the South, found themselves indifferent to their departure now that machines could do the work.

The trains heading north began to fill.

Image: Lange, Dorothea, White sharecropper family near Cleveland, Mississippi. Cleveland Mississippi, 1937 June.

6/28