Arthur Rothstein Missouri Photograph
Arthur Rothstein made some of the most significant documentary photographs ever taken of rural and small-town America.
These images were created during his years traveling throughout the nation on assignment for the US Farm Security Administration, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” agencies that restored and rebuilt an America devastated by the Great Depression.
In 1940, Rothstein joined the staff of Look magazine.
With the start of the WWll, Rothstein completed photojournalistic assignments for the US Army Signal Corps in China, Burma, and India.
After a short assignment for the United Nations, he returned to Look magazine, where he served as director of photography for 25 years during the Golden Age of post-war photo magazines.
He then held the same position for Parade magazine for 15 years, until his death in 1985.
During his years in magazine photojournalism Rothstein continued his own work, teaching, writing nine books as well as numerous newspaper and magazine columns on photography.
His photographs of America during the Great Depression were some of the most widely-published photographs of the 20th century, and are held in the collections of major museums around the world.
State highway officials moving evicted sharecroppers away from roadside to area between the levee and the Mississippi River, New Madrid County, Missouri, 1939. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.
A mass demonstration took place in New Madrid, Missouri, during the winter of 1939.
Approximately 1,100 sharecroppers, black and white, occupied two federal highways to emphasize the troubling predicament of cotton laborers.
Sharecropping exploited labor and fostered racism.
Some of the Bootheel farmworkers were transient, moving from farm to farm.
Others had been forced off land they had worked for generations. All were displaced with no place to go.
The protest, with entire families camped along the highway in the freezing cold, was well into its second week when the State Highway Patrol began moving people from the roadside.
The protest was an embarrassment to municipal and state governments.
Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein was there with his camera to document what was going on.
He hoped that his pictures would illustrate and draw attention to the plight of the landless farmers.
This Arthur Rothstein exhibit is made possible by the Arthur Rothstein Legacy Project.