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The New Deal Farm Security Administration in the Lower Mississippi Delta:
Reading the Photographic Record
by
Jane Adams
D. Gorton

Marion Post Wolcott’s 19 photos of the project, taken in October 1939, is quite different: the land is dotted with FSA houses and the families who live in them are all white. From Sidney Baldwin's history of the Farm Security Administration [7] we know that three-fourths or more of FSA land redistribution went to white tenants. Our still incomplete survey of these projects supports Baldwin’s report.


Project farmer with his cotton samples in the living room of his new home. Sunflower Plantations, Merigold, Mississippi Delta. Marion Post Wolcott. LC-USF34-052515-D
This is the dark side that the heroic, and now sometimes sentimentalized, story of the FSA projects rarely tells, and that is rarely visible in the photographs. What happened to the African American blacksmith who worked on Sunflower Plantation when it was still in private hands? Were there, as one would expect, many sharecroppers living on the plantation, and were the overwhelming majority of them black? We might be able to determine that by examining the 1930 census schedules, or the FSA records themselves, if they are still extant. Oral traditions in the area might also provide some information. The photographs themselves are mute.
"Double shovel" cultivator being repaired at Sunflower plantation. Near Sunflower, Mississippi. Carl Mydans, June 1936. LC-USF34- 006499-D
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