From The Arts At Page Library 

Image: Two African American Boys | Image Credit Russell Lee, Farm Security Administration (FSA)

The Arts At Page Library presents their online African American history, photography exhibition entitled, The Silent Intensity: African Americans in Southeast Missouri Farms. The online exhibition features an array of documentary photographs that tell a story about the conditions during the Great Depression, in which African Americans lived and worked as sharecroppers in the state of Missouri. The exhibition is available to the public from February 1, 2017 through February 28, 2017.

The Silent Intensity: African Americans in Southeast Missouri Farms, visually documents the lives of African American sharecroppers from the Great Depression that migrated from the south during 1900 and 1920, in search of work in Southeast Missouri’s Bootheel. Many of the workers were recruited from Mississippi and promised land to farm. Landowners contributed the seed, the farm implements, mules, and meager housing while the sharecropper worked the land from planting to harvest. Black workers were offered little money to support their families. The stock market crashed when the cotton market fell apart, and planter proprietors no longer needed sharecroppers and by the thousands African American workers in the Bootheel were evicted. President Roosevelt created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, created to fight American rural poverty and aid farmers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant workers.

Exhibition Details

The Silent Intensity: African Americans in Southeast Missouri Farms

On View through February 28, 2017

Access Online Here: http://theartsatpagelibrary.omeka.net/exhibits/show/silentintensity