Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, General Research and Reference Division

Susan Dabney Smedes, A Southern Planter: Social Life in the Old South (New York: Pott, 1900)

The South in the 1910s was only fifty years away from slavery. Most black families counted members who had been enslaved, and many in the younger generations still lived in slaverylike conditions as sharecroppers tied down to white plantations.