Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section071/Mary Hines

Overview
Mary Hines was a black teacher born in Monroe County, Alabama. She was a mother of nine children, five who were alive, who led their own professional lives. Mary’s father was a slave, but he did not remember much about slavery because his parents were freed when he was young. After their granted freedom, Mary’s family went on to start their lives in tenant farming. Despite their color, Mary’s family lived pretty well off. Each of her daughters works as a teacher and make wages which help their family’s living conditions.

Biography
Mary Hines was born in Monroe County, Alabama as one of seven children. Her father, David McCants, born a slave as a child, became a tenant farmer as an adult. Hines relocated around Alabama several times as a child when her father would go from employer to employer.[1] When Mary reached her twenties, she attended the Colored Industrial Seminary at Snow Hill, and after she completed her eleventh grade of schooling, began teaching. When Mary turned twenty-five, she married Dock Hines who was an older widow at the time.[2] While raising their children, her husband worked as a teacher before he switched to a factory job for a higher income. His factory shut down in 1926; by this time Hines had raised most of their nine children, with four having died.[3] Her husband soon lost his eyesight and became disabled; with Mr. Hines being unable to work, the Great Depression led to the dissipation of their family home. Hines and her children worked in fields to support their household and increase their income. By 1939, the Hines began paying the government five dollars a month to retain their house for several years.[4] Hines had four daughters who all worked as teachers during the school year and in the fields during the summer. Hines death date is undetermined.[5]

The Great Depression and African American Inequality
In the late 1920s to the late 1930s, The Great Depression transformed the The United States into economic shambles. African Americans who were known to be the “last hired, first fired”[6], we the ones who suffered the most at the hands of this economy with inflated unemployment rate in the 1930s. When the stock market crash of 1929 came about, African Americans worked chiefly at unskilled jobs. Because of this detriment, those jobs were either handed over to unemployed white people or completely dissipated.[7] Specifically in the South, African American joblessness were double or triple of that of the white population.[8] Countless numbers of Southern African American sharecroppers combined the Great Migration to the urban North during the Great Depression.[9] During the presidential election of 1932, thousands of African Americans who had previously been registed as Republicans began to switch their party affiliations to the Democratic party in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.[10] The New Deal did not work for the sake of African Americans lives compared to the whites and caused their economic disparity. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, “an effort to facilitate farm purchasing power by establishing acreage and production control”[11], immensely ostracized African Americans and led to white farmers evicting these people from their farms as tenants. The National Recovery Administration who were designed specifically to increase wages, caused an increased expectation of workers and a unbalanced number of black workers to be lay off.[12] In the 1930s, the United States also underwent a housing scarcity. The Federal Housing Administration executed programs that were “primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families”[13] as African Americans and other minorities were placed into urban housing projects instead of the new suburban groups. The Federal Housing Administration declined mortgages in and around African American communities; this is known as “redlining”.[14] The FHA sponsored constructors to mass-produce entire subsidiary groups for white families, with the regulation that none could be sold to African-Americans. This partitioning led to a pattern of condensed poverty.[15] Nationwide, the New Deal programs was planned to assist citizens from the Great Depression, but state regulations and individuals drafted it so that African Americans could not receive the same benefits as other Americans.[16]

Mary Hines and Her Family
During this time, The Hines family were living in the Great Depression. Times of economic disparity were tough for the colored family. They were trying to redeem their home. The text states, “To do this, they will have to pay $5 a month to the government for the next seven years.” The black community lived in makeshift houses, but The Hines family lived in better conditions due to their employment. In this interview, we see that Mary’s husband remarks on how tenant farmers will become fewer due to the Federal Government giving the farmer half the subsidy. He states, “The government has just made two classes of American people. The lower class has turned to beggars; the higher class has turned to grafters. That comes from putting money in their control.” We see in this quote that Mary’s husband does not trust the federal government with their money; mostly likely due to the Great Depression. The family unit was often large. Mothers had many children and not all of them survived. For example, Mary had nine children, four of whom died. When women were not married, they usually stayed in their parents’ household. We see this with Mary’s two daughters, Blona and Myrtice. A lot depends on their work and help around the house. Marriage was often made for convenience; Mary’s marriage is an example of this. Her husband was a widow and she was getting older, so she decided to marry him because of that. She did not love him, but grew to care for him and his nine children which she mothered. Children also helped the family with money. Mary said, “To keep from starving I gathered my four girls and John Wesley and went to the field to hoe. I put the baby in a corner of the fence in a big cotton basket, and there we hoed, picked cotton and strawberries from morning until dark…” Her culture allowed her to think independently as a woman. The text states, “Like many of her race and sex, it is plain that she seems not to put any dependence in any boy or man.” Because of her husband’s disabilities, she and her children do most of the labor inside and outside the house. Courting was a major deal back then. You would court before officially seeing another. During these times, religion played a major role in culture. Mary stated, “After all my raising them right; I always made them go to the Methodist Church with me and tried to bring them up in the straight and narrow way; but I didn’t spare the rod either.” She believes in disciplining her children; such was the culture at that time.