Land of cotton

This segment of the journalistic series, photographed in part by Walker Evans, looks at the exploited sharecropper in a one-crop economy. Predicting the breakdown of the South's single-crop system, this issue reveals the economically brutal conditions under which indigent Americans, owning no land but farming 70% of the cotton crop acreage, were forced to live in 1936. Sympathetic to southern strikers, the film includes a re-creation of the murder of a union member and the flogging of social worker Sue Blagden and the Reverend Claude Williams who were investigating the death.