Post-Reconstruction Black Economic Life through Labor, and Plantation Work, U.S. South and Caribbean, 1890s-1900s

Sharecropping Plantation Labor

Photograph

African American stereoview archive documenting Black labor in cotton, rice, turpentine, phosphate, fruit, and plantation agriculture across the post Reconstruction South and Caribbean, 1890s-1900s, showcasing how emancipation gave way to a new labor order structured by low wages, racial control, export agriculture, and restricted economic mobility. Images show how Black communities were forced to sustain regional economies after abolition through field labor, crop processing, dock loading, and domestic survival within segregated social systems. The archive bears on the history of Jim Crow political economy, when Black freedom existed alongside plantation continuity, debt dependency, and labor arrangements that kept agricultural production and raw material extraction tied to white ownership.

Photo archive of 19 black and white stereographs, 3.5" x 7", United States, Caribbean, and Jamaica, 1890s-1900s. The cards include titled views of "Gathering Cotton on a Southern Plantation, Dallas, Texas," "Cars Loaded with Cotton Bales on Levee Near Cotton Growing District, Texas," "Large Stones for Hulling Rice, the Hulling Stone for Removing Chaff, Savannah, Ga.," "Chipping Virgin Turpentine Trees, Ga.," "In a great pine forest, collecting turpentine, North Carolina," and "Sweating out tar from Pine Wood in the turf covered Tar Kiln, North Carolina." Additional views show Black workers in a pineapple field in southern Florida, harvesting coconuts at Lake Worth, Florida, mining phosphate and loading cars near Dunnellon, Florida, sugar cane labor in St. Kitts, coffee pickers arriving at the mill in Guadeloupe, and a domestic mountain home in Jamaica. Several interior scenes show Black adults and children gathered around tables, a staged phonograph scene with young Black girls, and card game views captioned in dialect by white publishers, making racial caricature part of the archive's structure alongside the labor scenes. Across the group, workers appear in fields, forests, mills, levees, and improvised interiors, carrying cotton, cutting cane, scraping trees for resin, handling freight, operating basic processing equipment, and standing within the landscapes that organized their daily work.

This collection demonstrates the continuity of slavery and the post emancipation labor regime. Cotton, rice, sugar, turpentine, phosphate, and tropical agriculture remained central to southern and Atlantic commerce after abolition, and Black workers continued to supply the labor that made those systems profitable while facing disfranchisement, segregation, coercive contracts, and narrow access to landownership. Minor toning and edgewear. Overall very good condition. A photographic narrative of how Black livelihood and Black labor underwrote the southern and Caribbean economy in the decades after slavery formally ended.

Item #23218

Price: $885.00