This postcard was not mailed, so there is no personal story attached to it.
Sometime around 1905, the Detroit Publishing Company printed this postcard photograph of Black workers in a cotton field of the South.
After the Civil War, the promise of Reconstruction was never fully achieved.
In the places where Black communities did prosper – culturally, politically, and economically – the removal of Federal troops and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante repressive groups reversed most of this progress.
https://time.com/5256940/reconstruction-failure-excerpt
(The recent attention given to the mob violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma often omits mention of how often and in how many places this racist action occurred.
Thus, at the turn of the 20th century, many Blacks in the South were poor agricultural workers.
In this photograph, we see a young man and a young woman laboring with hoes in a furrowed field.
The landscape is flat, although there is some evidence of brush in the distance.
Beside the field, one can see some indistinct building – it may be in ruins.
Cotton was the engine of Southern prosperity, and the back-breaking cultivation continued long after slavery was abolished.
Not until the mid-20th century did mechanization replace much of the drudgery of cotton cultivation.
I rescued this photograph from a box of 25-cent postcards because the scene looked realistic -without the romanticism that often obscured the hard and punishing work in the cotton fields.
