The
Sharecropping Family, Macon County
Sharecropping Family, Macon County
stock market crash in the waning days of October 1929 heralded the beginning of the worst economic depression in U.S. history. The Great Depression hit the South, including Georgia, harder than some other regions of the country, and in fact only worsened an economic downturn that had begun in the state a decade earlier. U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs for economic relief and recovery, known collectively as the New Deal, arrived late in Georgia and were only sporadically effective, yet they did lay the foundation for far-reaching changes. Not until the United States' entry into World War II (1941-45) did the depression in Georgia fully recede.
Georgia's Economy in the 1920s
Much of the nation was enjoying a manufacturing and production boom in the 1920s, but a combination of overproduction, foreign competition, and new man-made fabrics, such as rayon, led to falling cotton prices in Georgia. By the mid-1920s, the effects of the boll weevil, which first arrived in 1915, had ravaged Georgia's cotton fields and further decreased small farmers' prospects for making a living. Between 1918 and 1928 the price of cotton decreased from 28.88 cents/pound to 17.98 cents/pound, and then bottomed out in 1931 at 5.66 cents/pound. To keep up with the lower prices being offered for their products, farmers needed to purchase expensive new farm machinery, but only a few rich landowners had the money to afford such investments.
On top of the boll weevil's effects and decreasing cotton prices, a three-year drought beginning in 1925 and an insufficient irrigation system further depressed Georgia's agricultural economy. Some abandoned their farms and moved to cities or out of the state, contributing to the ongoing "great migration" into northern states. Others were forced off their land by foreclosure and became sharecroppers on terms dictated by large landowners. On the eve of the Great Depression about two-thirds of farm land in the state was operated by sharecroppers. The majority were poor whites who lived on an annual per capita income of less than $200.
Conditions
Sharecroppers, Greene County
Sharecroppers, Greene County
were harsher for blacks, whose entanglement in the sharecropping system dated back to the end of the Reconstruction era. While some still owned their own farms in the 1920s, many were forced off their land entirely by declining prices and into menial jobs in towns and cities. Others took the now-familiar path of migrating to urban areas in the state or industrial centers in the North, often joining relatives who had migrated during the mid-1910s. By 1935 just 12 percent of blacks owned the land they worked.
