04/26/2026
When I say our history was intentionally erased. This is an example of what I'm referring to....
The federal government took 175,000 photographs of poor Americans between 1935 and 1944, and a small staff in Washington decided which ones would never be seen.
They marked thousands of those negatives to be destroyed before printing. Most of the destroyed photographs were of Black sharecropper children. Almost none of those children had names written on the captions.
Roy Stryker's staff in Washington had a hole punch on their desk. They used it to mark the negatives they decided would never be printed, a small round hole through the corner of the film, or sometimes through the middle of the image itself.
The hole was about the size of a pencil eraser, and once it was through the nitrate, the negative could no longer be reproduced cleanly. Historians who later studied the archive called those negatives, in the quiet language of the file room, killed.
About 175,000 black-and-white negatives survive from the federal photography project that ran from 1935 to 1944. Many of the marked ones still sit in the Library of Congress today, with that round mark punched through them, a permanent decision made by a man at a desk who would never meet the people in the frame.
Most of those people were poor, and many of them were Black. Almost all of the Black children photographed by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano and Ben Shahn arrived in the federal record without names.
The captions say things like Sharecropper's children, Person County, North Carolina. They say Son of a sharecropper, Mississippi County, Arkansas, August 1935, or Oldest son of a sharecropper family working in the cotton, Chesnee, South Carolina.
What they almost never say is who.
I think about that often when I see the photographs that get passed around online with the captions about Black history, the ones with the kids on the porch, the ones with the bare feet on the dirt. The ones where the older sister has her arm draped around the smaller brother and you can see, even through the dust and the silver gelatin and the eighty years between then and now, that one of them is still smiling.
That smile is its own kind of evidence.
It tells you that nobody asked these children to perform suffering for the camera, even though that is what the camera was sent there to find. The Resettlement Administration, and later the FSA, and later the Office of War Information, paid those photographers to document rural poverty so Congress would fund relief programs and the country would see what was wrong.
The children, of course, did not know any of that. They were just children, and a strange white man with a Speed Graphic was showing up in their yard, and one of them grinned anyway, the way kids do.
Most of those grinning children went into the file under labels like Sharecropper's Children. Ben Shahn spent a Sunday morning in 1935 with a Black sharecropping family near Little Rock, Arkansas, and the photographs he made that day are some of the most quietly tender in the entire FSA archive.
He never wrote down their names. The historian who later studied the images called it a shame, because we will never know what happened to those children in the years that followed.
We do know what happened to some of the others, though. Not because the photographers wrote their names down, but because around the same time the cameras were going through the Delta, a different group of federal workers was moving through the same towns with notebooks and pencils.
The Federal Writers' Project, between 1936 and 1938, sent its interviewers to find the last living people who had once been children inside American slavery, and they wrote down more than two thousand three hundred of them. Most were elderly by then, average age eighty-five, with some claiming a hundred and more.
What they remembered was their childhoods.
A woman named Josephine Anderson sat with an interviewer named Jules A. Frost in Tampa, Florida on October 20, 1937, and started to talk. She had been brought to Sanderson, in Baker County, Florida, when she was only five years old.
Her stepfather, a man named Stephen Anderson, worked for a turpentine company making barrels. He stayed at that job until he dropped dead in the camp.
Josephine remembered her mother, Dorcas, in a way that snags the heart and will not let go.
She told Frost: "I doan recleck ever seein my mammy wear shoes. Even in de winter she go barefoot, an I reckon cold didn't hurt her feet no moran her hands an face."
That is one Black mother's bare feet, on one Florida winter, told by her daughter sixty years later, because nobody else was going to write it down.
Dorcas spun the cloth her family wore. She did it at home, with her own mother and her own daughter, in whatever spare time was left after the work they did for other people.
A man named Tom Robinson, enslaved as a child in Catawba County, North Carolina, sat down with his WPA interviewer and told her what he remembered most clearly about his mother.
He said he could just barely picture her face. But he could still see the room.
He said: "I do remember how she used to take us children and kneel down in front of the fireplace and pray. She'd pray that the time would come when everybody could worship the Lord under their own vine and fig tree. All of them free. It's come to me lots of times since. There she was a-praying, and on other plantations women was a-praying."
Read that twice. He said it like he had been waiting most of his life to say it to a federal employee with a notebook.
His mother had been praying for him by the fire. On other plantations, every night, other Black mothers had been kneeling and praying for their children too.
He had carried that image inside him from the time he was small until the day the WPA finally came to ask.
The interviewers were almost all white southerners, and many of them recorded what they heard in dialect spelling that flattens the speakers on the page. Modern historians argue, fairly, that the narratives must be read with care.
What they cannot argue is that the narratives are silent.
What we have, in those volumes, is the voice of more than two thousand Black Americans who were children once, on land their families did not own, in clothes their mothers had spun by hand at night by the light of a pine knot, and who lived long enough to be asked. The asking happened too late, and it still happened.
Set those interviews next to the FSA photographs and you start to feel the shape of what was lost. The photographs gave us the faces with no names, and the interviews gave us the names with no faces.
The two archives almost never line up. A child standing barefoot on a Mississippi porch in 1935 was not interviewed in the same town two years later, because the writers were looking for survivors of slavery, not survivors of sharecropping.
The children in the photographs grew up in the photographs and disappeared, mostly, into the second Great Migration. They went to Detroit and Memphis and Mobile and Oakland and Chicago.
Their names became other names, on housing project intake forms and shipyard payroll books and elementary school registrations a thousand miles from where the picture was taken.
Some of them are still alive.
Think about that for a second. A child who was eight years old in a Russell Lee photograph from 1938 would be ninety-six right now, and there are people walking around today who do not know that a federal photographer, on a hot Missouri afternoon when they were sitting on a porch with their grandparents, took a picture that is now in the Library of Congress, captioned with no name attached to it.
Their names exist. The captions just never caught up.
This is what I think about when I see those photographs go viral, with the pull-string captions about no toys, no comfort, no promise. Those captions are not wrong.
The children were poor, and the country had built a system designed to keep them poor, and the camera could see that without being told.
What the captions sometimes miss is that the children were not symbols then, and they are not symbols now. They were specific people.
Charlie Bell and Rose Holman and Josh Tarbutton sat for their portraits in Mississippi for the WPA with their names recorded. Hundreds of Black children sat for the FSA without theirs.
The difference between the two archives is not the children. The difference is who was holding the pencil.
History is also the act of holding the pencil.
When we share these images now, with our own captions, in our own languages, on our own platforms, we are doing what Roy Stryker's staff did not do. We are deciding what gets printed, and what gets a hole punched through it, and what gets a name.
We do not get to know all the names. We can refuse to pretend that the absence of a name is the absence of a person.
The smile is still there, in the corner of that photograph, on that porch, eighty-some years later.
It is not waiting on us to validate it. The child was already smiling, because that is what children do, even in shacks the country forgot.
What waits on us is the sentence underneath, the caption we choose. The name we are willing to look for, and the silence we are willing to sit in when we cannot find one.
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NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about the Black children documented in American photographic and oral history archives, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
