Competition for Less to Eat Than My Dog
Payday for Workers Near Homestead, Florida, 1939, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Here’s another Great Depression era letter. In southern turpentine belt, “half-starved Whites and Blacks strugg[led] in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel” wrote Chief Investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration Lorena Hickok to Federal Civil Works Administrator Harry L. Hopkins. She goes on to say, a local said to me, “Do you know who does the lynching down here? . . .It’s the poor whites. That’s where your race prejudice is deepest. And it’s because they have this eternal struggle with the Blacks for a bare existence.” Moultrie, Georgia, Winter 1934
