YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES by...
YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White (University of Georgia Press: $19.95; 54 pp.). Caldwell and Bourke-White traveled through the rural South in 1937 to document the lives of poor sharecroppers, revealing that moribund cotton plantations were supported by ill-clothed, uneducated, “malnurtured†men, women and children. Landlords preferred Afro-American laborers, who could be worked harder and who had fewer opportunities for redress, which reduced whites to scratching out a living on the most marginal land. Although sharecropping has largely disappeared in the South, in recent years it has reappeared in California.
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
