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The New Deal Farm Security Administration in the Lower Mississippi Delta:
Reading the Photographic Record
by
Jane Adams
D. Gorton
But we have one case, Transylvania Project in East Carroll Parish, where we know a good bit about what happened, and we even have Russell Lee’s photographs to guide us in. As in Sunflower, Russell Lee photographed the project before it was settled by the project families, in January 1939, and Wolcott photographed it a year and a half later in June 1940. That month Wolcott also documented La Delta project, Thomastown, Louisiana.

When we visited the FDR library in Hyde Park, New York, in 2004, we came across three items about Transylvania. The black sharecroppers were protesting their removal.

On January 17, the president's secretary referred a letter, with a synopsis, from the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches in America, asking the President "to secure fair treatment for the Negroes of Transylvania F.S.&A. Project, to the USDA's Farm Security Administration.

On January 21, 1939, the New Orleans agent for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, telegrammed to ask the president about "what action if any is being taken relative to letter of protest regarding negro farm tenants on Transylvania, Louisiana, FSA project..."
View full memo from the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches in America

View memo regarding the letter from the agent for the Pittsburgh Courier
And finally, on January 26, two "ex-service men" telegrammed the President saying "More than 100 men and women and children are being forced from their homes destitute and no funds to fight in court to save ourselves. Immediate action necessary to stop dispossession; adults mostly aged and have no place to go. Please save us."


View copy of telegram from ex-service men

The next year we made a brief trip to Lake Providence as part of our general effort to inventory all the FSA projects in the Delta. Transylvania was the most intact project we had witnessed, with many neat homes; many of the residents' extended families lived in the project.



Photos by D. Gorton 2005
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