Illustrations of the American South

Here you will find illustrations of the American South

Source: Various places on the WWW.

Stubborn Segregationists



Passengers remain segregated on an Atlanta, Georgia, bus despite the 1956 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on all public buses. Georgia state officials maintained that Georgia's segregation laws would not immediately be affected



King Cotton in Peril



Rates of migration were accelerated by economic conditions. Because of increased world production and the onset of an international economic depression, American production of cotton - which had been a major export until the 1920s - was facing collapse. The need for labor steadily decreased as a result of mechanization, improved methods of irrigation, seed genetics, and more effective pesticides

Tenant Farming

Southern tenant farmers were also deeply affected by New Deal agricultural policies. A tenant farmer rented land from a landowner, producing and marketing crops independently and then paying a percentage of his profits to the landowner. The 1935 census recorded 2.2 million tenant farms. African Americans in the South farmed approximately one-quarter of these - or about 500,000 farms. Between 1930 and 1950, the total number of tenant farmers in the South decreased by 50 percent. Government policies, mechanization, and industrialization greatly reduced their numbers.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan - in its various incarnations throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries - used terror and intimidation to enforce its ideals of white supremacy and to punish anyone viewed as a threat to those ideals. During the civil rights movement, many Klan-affiliated groups emerged, gained support, and became increasingly violent in their efforts to suppress African Americans and civil rights advocates. These Klansmen walk in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott in 1956.

Young Migrant Worker

The migrant workers' conditions were deplorable. They lived in overcrowded, dilapidated cabins. Children followed their family and often worked full time.

Intimidation in Texas

Demonstrators in Fort Worth, Texas, protest the moving of a black family into an all-white neighborhood in September 1956. The head of the family, Lloyd Austin, held off more than two hundred protesters with a rifle

Rural Poverty

Many who migrated from the rural South were escaping the direst conditions. During the 1930s, sharecroppers and tenants were among the poorest Americans, earning incomes far below the national average. In the mid-1930s, the median household income in the United States was $1,500; a study of employed sharecroppers in four Southern states found the average income of

black families to be $294

Southern Poverty

Extreme poverty was the lot of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who often ended up in debt after a full year of work. By the 1930s, vast numbers of cotton laborers, sharecroppers, and

tenant farmers were displaced

Day Work

During the Depression, the migration out of the South was insignificant. Finding work anywhere was a challenge. Trapped in the South, African Americans often could rely only on day work. They traveled great distances for a day or a few weeks of work as cotton or strawberry pickers. These migrant workers travel from Tennessee to Arkansas to hoe cotton.