Sharecroppers—tenant farmers who paid rent with a share of the harvest—faced a perfect storm of disaster and displacement during the Great Depression. Crashing farm prices and mechanization reduced the need for farm labor; then years of drought, dust storms and floods destroyed cropland in many regions of the county. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers who had worked the land—often for generations—were suddenly forced to move.

The malnourished, ill-clad, and homeless sharecropper families lost access to schools, healthcare and established support networks. With unemployment rates near 25 percent there were few job opportunities for the dispossessed, and many slipped into abject poverty.

Government price-supports paid farmers to cut production, adding pressure to evict sharecroppers, but few landowners split the subsidy with their tenants as required by the program. When Arthur Rothstein took this photo in 1935, President Roosevelt was pressuring Congress to create additional New Deal programs that would provide direct assistance to struggling sharecroppers.