farm tenancy

Recounts the life and experiences of an illiterate African-American tenant farmer from east-central Alabama.

Words and photographs describe the daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the American South.

Betty Grant Henshaw recounts her family's struggles to earn a living as tenant farmers in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era.

In the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee, portrayed the lives of three sharecropper families in the South during the Depression, documenting the tyranny of the tenant farming system that enslaved some nine million tenants in 1936. Fifty years later, Maharidge and Williamson have revisited, photographed, and interviewed the surviving members and descendants of the families shown in that book.

Words and photographs describe the daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the American South.