It’s All Done Gone

By Patsy Watkins

During the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration captured nearly a quarter-million images of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, migrant workers, and industrial laborers. Of the roughly one thousand FSA photographs taken in Arkansas, approximately two hundred were selected for inclusion in this volume. They portray workers picking cotton for five cents an hour, families evicted from homes for their connection with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the effects of flood and drought that cruelly exacerbated the impact of economic disaster. The photos from acclaimed photographers illustrate teh extreme hardships that so many Arkansans endured throughout this era.