Migratory Workers by a "Juke Joint"

Marion Post traveled alone as she sought to fairly portray American life during the Depression.  She especially wanted to show the adverse effects of segregation which was legal in America, at the time:

...They [the FSA photographers] sent back photographs that revealed the effects of institutional segregation and the servile conditions of field labor (the scratched hands, shoeless feet, evictions).  Instead of repeating common racially coded depictions, they used the new, smaller cameras, which required only daylight, to get informal images with a sense of individual differences in dress, posture, and identity. 

Instead of limiting images to cotton labor, a monocultural stereotype, they also showed black people in juke joints, in barbershops, in train stations, on sidewalks, in cotton dealings, and in commissary stores.  Marion Post Wolcott in particular worked at gaining access to black social life in spaces they controlled, once by persuading the son of a local planter to take her to a juke joint outside Clarksdale.  (Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories, by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton, page 304.)

This is a Marion Post Wolcott photo of a "juke joint" in Belle Glade, Florida.  She took the picture in February of 1941.

Click on the image for a better view.  Part of the "Bound for Glory" exhibition from the Library of Congress.

Credits

Image 50 (of 70) included in the Exhibition, "Bound for Glory," online courtesy Library of Congress.  The LOC describes this reproduction, from a color slide, as follows:

Marion Post Wolcott.  African American migratory workers by a "juke joint".  Belle Glade, Florida, February 1941.  Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-172.   LC-DIG-fsac-1a34395.   FSA/OWI Collection.  Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Quoted passage from Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories, by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton.