Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

Carl Mydans/Resettlement Administration

Many who migrated from the rural South were escaping the direst conditions. During the 1930s, sharecroppers and tenants were among the poorest Americans, earning incomes far below the national average. In the mid-1930s, the median household income in the United States was $1,500; a study of employed sharecroppers in four Southern states found the average income of black families to be $294.