Incredible images reveal the poverty and deprivation of plantation workers in America’s Deep South in the 1930s
The pictures are incredibly poignant today, but some historians view them as US government propaganda
THE harsh reality of life on plantations in the Deep South in 1930s America has been revealed in a series of stunning colour pictures.
The incredible images show black labourers baking under the blazing sun, picking cotton and cutting Burley tobacco - before putting it on sticks to wilt in the curing and drying barn.
The pictures show the stark difference between the lives of black and white residents, as well as the poverty and malnourishment which remained as an enduring legacy of slavery.
Some shots show the workers during their 'down time' - relaxing on a porch on a Bayou Bourbeau plantation, fishing at the creek and hanging out outside a 'juke joint', a place for dancing, drinking and gambling.
While the black labourers toil in the fields, other images show white farmers and townspeople gathering in the centre of town on Court Day in a scene reminiscent of Harper Lee's legendary novel To Kill a Mocking Bird.
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Although the images are striking and eye-opening to us today - they are, according to some historians, also works of "propaganda".
At the time they were taken, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's bold New Deal, his plans to lift America out of the Great Depression, needed more public support.
For the first time, an American government was moved to listen to the needs of the suffering population.
Marion Post Wolcott, whose images are shown in this article, was one of the photographers charged with documenting the deprivation which 'proved' the New Deal was needed.
"As an FSA documentary photographer, I was committed to changing the attitudes of people by familiarising America with the plight of the underprivileged, especially in rural America," she is quoted as saying in a University of Virginia biographical sketch.
"FSA photographs shocked and aroused public opinion to increase support for the New Deal policies and projects, and played an important part in the social revolution of the 30s."
The team of photographers produced 270,000 pictures between 1935 and 1943, costing the government £780,000 ($1 million) - an absolutely enormous sum in those days.
One historian, also writing for the University of Virginia, said: "Could the FSA photographs, allegedly unadulterated and objectively snapped, be art, or, rather, did they represent purely propagandistic material? The answer encompasses both views."