Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers

This study of the rural poor in the American South is the second volume of Dr. Robert Coles' award-winning Children of Crisis, a series of books which, when complete, will constitute one of the most vigorous and thoroughly documented studies ever made of poor people in America.

Ever since the late 1950's, Dr. Coles has been studying, traveling, interviewing, and, above all, listening to the American poor and those who live by their side, or affect their destiny. Out of his by now vast experience he conveys, with both judgment and compassion, the unheard voices of the American population. Migrants, Shareсroppers, Mountaineers concerns itself with three groups: first, the migrant workers who travel up and down the eastern coast of this country from Florida to Maine through the seasons, picking crops day after day on farm after farm, with no place to call home and without any of the ordinary prerequisites of American citizenship (no schools of their own, few advocates or defenders, scant protection by the laws). Second, the sharecroppers and tenant farmers who still live isolated in the Black Belt of the Old South on plantations, just as their ancestors (many of them slaves) did before them. Third, the mountaineers of Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, where the only choice for survival, if choice be offered, lies between coal mining and near starvation. Robert Coles has lived with and listened to hundreds of families among these forgotten Americans and has been writing, in volumes such as this, what amounts to a social history of late twentieth-century America.