Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section 061/Lula Wright

Overview
Lula Wright, affectionately known as “Miss Lu”, was an African American woman interviewed for the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s. She was a tenant farmer on a plantation in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was interviewed by Rhussus L. Perry, a black farm worker from Macon, Alabama, on January 18th, 1939.

Early Life
Lula Wright was born in 1868 in Cotton Valley, Alabama. She was the oldest daughter in the family and had seven brothers and three sisters. Growing up in the deep south, her family was very religious. They went to church on Sundays and always said their prayers. Wright went to school with her siblings up until the fifth grade. She grew up with good food and warm clothes, claiming her father spoiled her and her siblings.

Marriage and Motherhood
Wright married Jasper Sanford, her first husband, in 1886. Wright and Sanford had eleven children together. They had seven girls and four boys. Wright continued to be religious in her young adult life while raising her children. She also sent all her children to school until each child wanted to quit. In 1918, when Wright was 50 years old, Sanford and her oldest son both died. In 1927, Wright's daughter, Lucille, died of sickness, just around age 21. Wright married a second time, to a man named Eddie Wright.

Life on the Plantation
Wright was a pilar of the community on the Green’s Plantation where she lived. She created a community club with around 12-13 members who met once a week and sang and prayed. They also raised money during the year to be able to pool and spend on rations in town during Christmastime. In order to make extra money, in addition to working for the Green’s, Wright also sold candy and other small things from her home. Wright's death location and date are unknown.

Jim Crow Alabama
Alabama during the 1930s was one of the largest contributors to the continuation of oppression of African Americans in the United States. Jim Crow laws limited the social mobility of black families in the south. Many black families were forced to rely on farming or other labor-intensive jobs that paid very little. Tenant farming kept black families on plantations, even though slavery was abolished. Organizations were created to aid black tenant farmers, such as the Colored Farmer’s Alliance, which encouraged buying from other members and creating a community of African American farmers. Most African Americans remained uniformed and weren’t touched by the effects of the Colored Farmer’s Alliance.

Agriculture During the Great Depression
During the Great Depression, the need for tenant farming began to plummet. The government created the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in 1933, a piece of legislation which would give subsidies to farmers mainly in the south. This was a promise made by Franklin Roosevelt when elected president in 1932, vowing to fix issues of poverty in the rural southern states.

Sharecropping
Sharecropping, also known as tenant farming, became popular after the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, and plantation owners still needed people to work the fields. The act of sharecropping itself is when a tenant farmer or laborer are allowed to work a certain portion of the land (mainly plantations) in exchange for a portion of the crop. This system created a cycle of debt for tenant farmers, exacerbated by high interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and greedy landlords and markets.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) was created to aid the tenant farmers and protect their rights. This was an effort created by both black and white Americans. It was originally created to protest the eviction of 23 farming families who were tenant farmers on a plantation near Tyronza. Efforts and support for the STFU slowly declined in the 1940s as focus shifted towards World War II.