“We Want Another La Forge”: The 1939 Roadside Demonstration in the “Bootheel”
On the front page of the January 9, 1939, issue of the Daily American Republic (Fig. 1.1), local readers in the “bootheel” of Missouri were alerted to an unprecedented demonstration slated to take place the following day: Over 1,000 recently unemployed and unhoused Black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers would stage a “camp-in” along the nearby Highway 60 and Highway 61 (Fig.1.2). [1] Spearheaded by Owen H. Whitfield, a local Black preacher and active member of the Southern Tenant Farmer Union (STFU) (Fig.1.3), this roadside demonstration was organized in an effort to, as Whitfield described to a reporter, “bring to the attention of the public the conditions facing these tenant farmers.” [2]
Fig. 1.1. Daily American Republic, Monday, January 9, 1939. (Poplar Bluff, Missouri) p.1
Fig. 1.2. Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60,New Madrid County, Missouri, 1939. Courtesy of Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection.
Fig. 1.3. Unidentified artist, Untitled [portrait of Rev. Owen Whitfield], n.d. Courtesy of The Whitfield Foundation for Success.
Several weeks before the start of the new year, many white landowners in this region of Missouri had chosen to issue eviction notices to their sharecroppers and tenant farmers in favor of employing day-laborers. [3] Their decisions to shift to a wage workforce came as a result of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), a policy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great Depression New Deal programming that gave federal monetary aid to Southern landowners in exchange for them reducing crop quantities. [4] The aim of the AAA was to raise and stabilize the costs of certain crops by limiting their production. [5] Landowners soon realized that it was cheaper to pair these AAA funds with a waged, day-labor force, since such workers did not require credited provisions and housing.
By the afternoon of January 10, news reports estimated that approximately 1,000 sharecroppers and tenant farmers had loaded all of their belongings into their trucks, cars, and wagons and set up makeshift lodgings along the two highways (Fig.1.4 & 1.5). [6] One correspondent noted that a family “had set up a kitchen cabinet, a stove, and the women had started preparing the noon meal.” [7] With nowhere to seek shelter, these recently evicted sharecroppers and tenant farmers temporarily transformed these two highway roadsides into communal living spaces. Despite experiencing frigid winds, rain, and snow, they remained steadfast in their belief that the protest would result in “getting them homes and land....to till during the coming year.” [8] One optimistic demonstrator expressed a specific desire for the federal government to intervene on these matters, exclaiming, “We want another La Forge.” [9]
Fig. 1.4. Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, 1939. Courtesy of Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection.
Fig. 1.5. Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, 1939. Courtesy of Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection.
“100 Homes in 100 days”: FSA Photo-Documentation of the La Forge Farms Project
Two years prior to the roadside demonstration, the federal government had in fact turned its attention to the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in this region. The “bootheel” of Missouri was seen as a site where the government could test its New Deal experimental approaches to combating the dire effects of rural poverty throughout the entire Mississippi Delta. [10] The Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency created under the New Deal, bought 6,700 acres of former plantation land in La Forge, New Madrid County, Missouri and subsequently launched the Southeastern Missouri Farms project, or the La Forge Farms project. [11] According to an official 1940 federal report on the initiative, the La Forge Farms project was created to determine if a different model of sharecropping might yield a high quality of life and more successful farming. [12] A crucial element of this radical experiment involved revamping the housing conditions of the 100 sharecropper families—60 white families and 40 Black families— who already resided on these 6,700 acres of land. [13] (Interestingly, Whitfield, who later led the organization of the highway demonstration, was a part of these 40 Black families.)
The FSA devised an initiative at La Forge called “100 homes in 100 days,” wherein all 100 sharecropper families on the land would be provided with either newly constructed or rehabilitated homes. [14] To realize this goal, the La Forge farm was temporarily transformed into a house construction site. The FSA hired local laborers to build cheap but quality prefabricated houses. The building process followed, as the 1940 report detailed, a “belt-line, mass-production system much like that used in an auto factory.” [15] These individual components were then assembled to produce identical four and five-room frame houses, sans in-unit bathrooms.
The 1940 federal report on La Forge boasted about the success of the inaugural rehousing initiative:
When the 100 families moved into their new homes, they found walls of tongued-and-grooved vertical paneling, oiled to retain the natural grain of the wood; double floors; a brick chimney located to serve both the kitchen range and the living room; screened windows; and built-in cabinets in the kitchen. […] [F]or the first time in its experience, each sharecropper family had an efficient barn, a sealed well, fences, food storage vaults and a sanitary privy. [16]
Alongside this textual description of the tangible gains of the “100 homes in 100 days” initiative, the FSA’s photo documentation of the project exists, offering a more intimate look into the sharecroppers’ experience of this housing program.
Eager to create a large-scale, visual portfolio of the before-and-after effects of the New Deal funding to the nation’s rural agricultural workers, Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s Information Division, sent photographer Russell Lee to La Forge with the task of documenting the “100 homes in 100 days” project and the general everyday realities of sharecroppers living on this newly redeveloped land. With his camera in hand, Lee chronicled the belt-line process for the construction and assembly of the prefabricated homes (Fig. 1.6 & 1.7), as well as the movement of the 100 sharecropper families into these new residences.
Though Lee himself indiscriminately documented the experiences of La Forge’s white and Black residents, the photographs that Stryker later chose for wide circulation in national newspapers and magazines almost exclusively showcase the lived realities of the white sharecropper families. Stryker’s selection criteria was undoubtedly influenced by race and racism. Moreover, his exclusionary archival practices have had lasting effects on our popular visual memory of the Great Depression South, particularly in regard to who experienced the devastating effects of this unprecedented economic collapse. As cultural writer Sarah Boxer notes in her 2020 article, “Whitewashing the Great Depression,” which was published in The Atlantic: “During the Depression, Black Americans made up more than half of the country’s tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and farmworkers in the South. [...] Yet, we’ve come to imagine the Great Depression as a largely white tragedy.” [17]
Fig. 1.6 Russell Lee, House plant. Precutting materials. Southeast Missouri Farms Project, 1938. Courtesy of Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection.
Fig. 1.7 Russell Lee, House erection. Unloading panels onto the platform. Southeast Missouri Farms Project, 1938. Courtesy of Library of Congress, FSA-OWI Collection.
Shaping Sanctuaries: Domestic and Communal Spaces of Depression-Era Black Southerners
When the reporter for the Daily American Republic observed that one family, who camped along the highways, “had set up a kitchen cabinet, a stove, and…started preparing the noon meal,” they indirectly illustrated the ways in which a sense of home —or a place of sanctuary—can be found in unlikely places or crafted under seemingly unfavorable circumstances. [18] Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South reflects the crucial role of home—in the broadest sense of the term—within the lives of Black Southerners during the Great Depression. Turning specific attention to the FSA’s documentation of interior dwellings and communal spaces, Crafting Sanctuaries explores how Depression-era Black Americans in the rural South worked to construct a sense of home and self within prefabricated farming houses and humble shacks. Taking up cultural theorist bell hooks’s assertion that Southern Black people “wor[ked] with space so that it would reveal and mirror the texture of [their] longings,” the photographs in this exhibition showcase Depression-era Black Southerners’ investment in imagining, designing, and adorning their interior worlds in spite of lacking material privilege. [19] The featured photographs also reflect how this will to imagine and design a place moves outside of one’s own home and into communal spaces, such as churches, schoolhouses, and barbershops—exemplifying the architecture scholar LaVerne Wells-Bowie’s claim that “outside was also a place shaped for living. [Black people] fashioned that space outside, too.” [20]
Spanning the photographic work of Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott; and five states (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Carolina), Crafting Sanctuaries highlights the domestic environments and larger spatial worlds of Black Southerners.
What does it mean to craft a sanctuary?
Footnotes:
[1] See “Unemployed Tenants Plan Demonstration on Route 61 Tuesday” in Daily American Republic, January 9, 1939, p.1.
[2] Ibid.
[3] See “1000 Farmers Join Trek To 2 Highways” in Daily American Republic, January 10, 1939, p.1.
[4] See Ibid; see Britannica, “Agricultural Adjustment Act: Relief, Recovery, Reform, Purpose, & Effect,” accessed June 2, 2025, ; see Jarod Roll, “‘Out Yonder on the Road’: Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri,” Southern Spaces, accessed June 2, 2025, ; see Michael J. O’Brien, “‘Federalized Prefabrication’ Southeast Missouri Farms Self-Help Housing in the 1930s,” Construction History 34, no. 1 (2019): 43–58.
[5] See Britannica Ibid; see Roll, Ibid.
[6] “1000 Farmers Join Trek To 2 Highways,” Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “Unemployed Tenants Plan Demonstration on Route 61 Tuesday,” Ibid.
[9] See “‘Croppers Ordered Back Into House By Health Board” in Daily American Republic, January 13, 1939, p.2.
[10]See United States. Farm Security Administration, “La Forge Farms” (Washington : Farm Security Administration, 1940), p. 2.
[11]United States. Farm Security Administration, “La Forge Farms,” Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid. The 1940 federal report of the La Forge Farms project described the prior living conditions of these sharecroppers: “Their homes were unpainted, loose-boarded shacks with sagging roofs. In many cases a family of five or more had only one room for sleeping, cooking, and eating.” See Ibid.
[14] Ibid., p.4.
[15] Ibid., p.3.
[16] Ibid., p.4.
[17] Sarah Boxer, “Whitewashing the Great Depression,” The Atlantic, December 2020, accessed September 22, 2023,
[18] Ibid.
[19] bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New Press, 1995). p. 148
[20] Laverne Wells-Bowie qtd. in bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New Press, 1995). p. 161
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