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July 1936. Hillhouse, Mississippi. "Sharecroppers' families gathering needs for their Fourth of July celebration, whites and blacks together." View full size. 4x5 nitrate negative by by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.
I always had scabs (and sometimes Band-Aids) on my knees when I was a kid too. It wasn't because I had a hard life, but because I PLAYED HARD, out in the dirt. I'm sure these kids did have a hard life, but I don't think the scabs have anything to do with it.
The Delta Cooperative Farm located near Hillhouse, Mississippi was an experiment in "Christian Socialism", governed on the Rochdale Principles of cooperation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles). In 1935 over a hundred striking sharecropper families allied with the Southern Tenants Farmers Union were evicted from the Arkansas plantation of C.H. Dibble. Aside from the violence met by the sharecroppers, they were also unable to find other work in the fields. A number of the Union members, both black and white, gathered at the site in Mississippi to create an experimental cooperative society. They were led by members of the Socialist Party along with Reinhold Niebuhr, one of America's leading theologians, and Sherwood Eddy, an ordained minister and missionary. The experiment lasted three years when the farm and some of the families resettled nearby at Providence Farms near Lexington, Mississippi.
In case anyone was wondering, the community is in the Northern Delta on MS Highway 1 near the Mississippi River.
Well, the "Oh Henry" box probably holds some homemade concoction, not candy bars from the company store or anything.
But check out the scabs and scars on those kids' legs. Theirs were not easy lives, for sure.
Look at the "Oh Henry" box being held by the girl on the left. Candy?
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