[3] The captions are not always accurate. See, e.g., Marion Post Wolcott’s mis-attribution of Joe Gow Nue & Co.’s grocery store to Leland, Mississippi, (LC-USF34- 052450-D) when it was a real Greenville landmark. The reason for this was the method they used: The photographers sent their film to Washington, DC, where it was developed and contact prints made. “After Stryker reviewed and selected images, the negatives and file prints (or "first prints") were returned to the photographers for captioning. The resulting captions were edited at the photographic unit's headquarters.” http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fabout.html accessed 5/25/06

[4] The photographs are a particularly rich source of data on the RA/FSA projects and Southern sharecropping: “The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording both rural and urban conditions throughout the United States as well as mobilization efforts for World War II.” Accessed 5/20/06

5] for an account of the process of digitization, see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fatech.html; on the indexing process, see Fleischhauer and Brannan 1988, Trachtenberg 1988; see also Smith, Meg, “Hard Times in Sharp Foucs: On-line Collection Shows America, 1935-1945. LC Information Bulletin, August 1998. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9808/fsa-osi.html)

[6] Carl Mydens, caption for LC-USF34- 006508-D

[7] The photo, "The Rain Are Fallin'" has achieved a degree of fame. A book is named for it ( ), and other references can be found to it on the Web. For example, Dr. Skip Eisiminger, a professor of English and humanities at Clemson University, wrote the following (http://www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/gantt/pdfs/006.pdf)

I keep copies of two photographs in my office. They help to keep me grounded, so I pull them from the files with some regularity. One was taken in 1939 and shows a poor black Louisiana mother homeschooling her two sons. Was there no public school for her attentive pupils? The six and seven-year-old boys sit on hard-bottom chairs (there are no desks), as their thirty-something mother sternly points a stick at the day’s reading lesson whitewashed on a rectangle of black fabric pinned to a wall that’s been papered over in newsprint. The lesson reads in its entirety, “The rain are fallin.” Below that sentence are the numerals and the alphabet—essentially a code consisting of thirtysix ciphers the boys may have a hard time cracking given the limitations of their tutor and the shortcomings of their classroom.

[8] Baldwin, Sidney, Poverty and Progress: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968, pp. 196-7.

[9] Scott, John H, with Cleo Scott Brown, Witness to the Truth: My Struggle for Human Rights in Louisiana. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. The story of the removal is in Chapter 8, pp. 79-93.

[10] The dynamics here appear considerably different from those documented by Spencer Wood and Wood and Gilbert in Mileston, Holmes County, Mississippi, although black demands for voting rights triggered violent responses in both areas.