The great irony of these New Deal programs is that people, who in their desperate poverty were integrated, were in their opportunity segregated.

Despite their overwhelming numbers in the Delta, almost the only power they had was individual and local. They could, occasionally, as John H. Scott did in Transylvania, and as the evicted sharecroppers did in the Missouri Bootheel in 1939, capture the attention of influential national organizations and media. The FSA photographers did not resolve the tension that existed between the reality of white supremacy and racial segregation on the one hand, and the reality of black majorities on the other. Occasionally they were visibly partisan, as with Arthur Rothstein’s documentation of the evicted sharecroppers in Southeast Missouri.

Such interventions, however, appear rare. More often the photographs are blank, documenting what the photographer saw, or was instructed to see. While Stryker carefully tailored his instructions to the politics of the day, the images by themselves do not reveal the instructions.

The digitized FSA photographs give us an opportunity to explore more deeply and easily the gritty reality of the 1930s. The photos can be organized to answer a wide variety of historical questions. They can be sorted by year and month, by photographer, by state, or other categories. When sorted by catalogue number, photos without captions can be viewed. The collective reality of the images becomes far clearer and meaningful.

While the pictures were used initially by the New Deal administrators as “propaganda” or public relations, they are also an unparallel documentation of rural America during the Depression years. They are even more remarkable because of the care with which the images were stored, their contemporaneous captions, and the records of how they were conceived and promoted.