Showers of Blessing

The Story of Myrtle Lawrence, Sharecropper and Social Activist, Photographed by Louise Boyle

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

499 kr

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In 1937, at the invitation of Myrtle Lawrence, a white sharecropper and organizer for the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), two Vassar graduates visited St. Francis County, Arkansas, to document the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Louise Boyle, photographer, and Priscilla Robertson, scribe, lived with the Lawrences for ten days and photographed the Lawrence family in their sharecropper shack, at STFU meetings, and in their jobs as cotton pickers. The pair took side trips to document two cooperative farming communities in the Mississippi delta, Dyess and the Delta Cooperative Farm. Unlike the famous photographs that emanated from the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, Louise Boyle was not a government employee. Far from being a propagandist for the New Deal, Boyle’s images demonstrate a social conscience aimed at raising public awareness of the catastrophic effects of New Deal farm programs on Black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers. In the eighty images reproduced here, Boyle represented Arkansas sharecroppers as dynamic, multifaceted, eager for upward mobility, and curious about the outside world. Boyle and Robertson created a body of work based on a woman-centered feminist ethic that forms the core of this book. Authors Elizabeth Payne and Janet Allured use STFU records, letters of and interviews with the three women, correspondence and interviews with STFU organizers, and newspaper accounts to provide the context and interpretation for Myrtle Lawrence’s stint as an agricultural labor organizer and Boyle’s remarkable photography.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-12-01
Mått203 x 203 x undefined mm
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor160
FörlagUniversity of Georgia Press
ISBN9780820378077

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Janet Allured (Author) JANET ALLURED, retired professor of history and women's studies at McNeese State University, is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Arkansas. She has numerous peer-reviewed publications on Southern women as changemakers, including Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, volume 1 (Georgia); Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women's Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950–1997 (Georgia); and, most recently, Southern Methodist Women and Social Justice: Interracial Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, a collection of biographies of white and Black laywomen and clergywomen, coedited with M. Kathryn Armistead. She currently resides in Arkansas.Elizabeth Anne Payne (Author) ELIZABETH ANNE PAYNE (1943–2025) was a professor of history at the University of Mississippi who also taught at the University of Arkansas. At both universities, she created and directed the Honors College. Payne’s publications include Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robbins and the Women’s Trade Union League; Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, volumes 1 and 2; Writing Women’s History: A Tribute to Anne Firor Scott; “The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union”; and an oral history documentary, “Making Do,” on the lives of Black and white women in northeast Mississippi in the mid-twentieth century.