Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section18/Lucy and Delie Ivory

Early Life
North Carolina’s Lucy Ivory was enslaved as a young girl but went on to live independently with her husband and work as a field laborer. She spent her early childhood working with her mother on a plantation. She remembered clearly the Yankees, New England emancipators, visiting their home when she was 4, encouraging them to demand pay. She attended school and met her husband there, whom she married at 19.

Later Life
She worked in a field and around their house while he found a job at a store. He suffered from an ulcer and ultimately passed away from liver cancer. They had children–she discusses at least 1 daughter, 1 son, Paul, and 1 grandson. She persevered through injustices granted to her, nerve damage from manual labor, and hard work, and was relatively successful in her community. Later in life she lived with Delie Smith, whom Lucy referred to as her “sister in de Lord”. Delie was several years younger than Lucy; she never married but had one son. She frequented the Chapel Hill area and worked various sharecropping jobs throughout her adult life. She lived with her son, Turner, until he was falsely accused and convicted of burning his former wife to death. Delie picked cotton and actively budgeted her money along with the pension she received. Both women recount the helpful care they received from doctors in the area.

Life After Emancipation for Black Americans
Navigating life as a recently emancipated African American in the late nineteenth century was no easy task. Even once the news of emancipation finally reached the outermost areas of the country, many Black Americans struggled to find work amidst employers that were still reluctant to hire them. College of Charleston’s Digital History Initiative writes how “they had little or no possessions or money to start their new lives with…They had to secure food, clothing, and housing. They had to determine where they would live, how to access a legal marriage”. Segregation controlled how African Americans were able to settle into neighborhoods and start businesses. In some primarily Black neighborhoods, business-owners were able to successfully establish a presence in the absence of the white animosity prevalent in white areas. However, African Americans living in primarily white neighborhoods struggled to make a living, because “without a concentrated African American population base, the owners were unable to compensate for the loss of their white patrons by catering to black customers, and their businesses declined”. After the stock market crash of 1929, African Americans experienced economic turmoil in larger and more severe numbers than most whites did.

The Protestant Religion During the Great Depression
Many historians report that an “American Religious Depression” both preceded and then accompanied the economic depression of the 1930s. As scientific rationalism emerged as a dominant way of thinking in the West, American Christians experienced a lull in the mission field, social attitudes, the Protestant church, and religious worldviews. The people’s responses to this religious depression varied: hard times and economic turmoil caused spikes in church activity in some circumstances and a rise in secular policy in others. Some groups of Protestants blamed God for their struggles and angrily demanded answers; others turned to collectivist doctrines to “[sanctify] social action” and help one another; finally, some viewed poverty as a type of righteous struggle that would bring one closer to God. The economic depression spurred some American Protestants to search for inspiration to reignite their faith. The period resulted in no drastic changes to the structure or practices of Christianity in America, yet the nuanced attitudes within the period toward God prove an interesting function of economic hardship.

The Beginning of Social Security in the United States
The Great Depression stimulated a spur of federal benefit programs enacted through President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislature. One of the most significant of these was social security, which provided federal tax money as a form of insurance for the elderly, the unemployed, and the poor. Until this protection was established, organized society worked together to help these groups of people. Weaver writes that, “the care of the poor of all ages was a responsibility assumed primarily by the private sector, generally through the extended family, friends and neighbors, and organized private charity”. Although omitting a healthcare provision, social security established provisions to ensure that several of society’s marginalized groups had their basic needs met.