Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section003/Lula Wright

Lula Wright
Nationality	American
Education	Fifth Grade Dropout
Occupation	Tenant Farmer
Spouse(s)	Jasper Sanford, Eddie Wright

Overview

Lula Wright was an African American tenant farmer and devout Christian who was a single mother of 11 children during the time of the Great Depression. Rhussus L. Perry was the interviewer on March 15th, 1939. Wright had a welcoming and loving personality which she attributed to her faith in god and her ability to support her family. Her loving personality translated to her being a major figure in her community from her cheerful remarks to her willingness to treat sick neighbors.

Biography

Early Life

Wright was born and raised in Cotton Valley, Alabama, shortly after the end of slavery in the United States. She was one of eleven children. Although obtaining an education was difficult and expensive. Wright and all her siblings were able to go to school up until fifth grade where she quit school to help her family in the fields and later get married. Although her father had a difficult life as a farmer and a parent to many siblings, he kept her and all her siblings well-fed and well-clothed throughout her childhood. She was fortunate enough through her father’s efforts to be able to go to school and Sunday school. At the age of 18, she married Jasper Sanford, an avid gambler.

Adult Life and Career

Wright had eleven children with Jasper Sanford. After her 11th child, her husband died and Wright later married Eddie Wright, a preacher. She moved with Eddie and her family to Tuskegee, Alabama where she lived til the day she died. Shortly after living in Tuskegee, she divorced Eddie after realizing he was not able to make enough money as a poor Pastor to properly feed both his and her children. Afterwards, Wright moved her family to a plantation in Tuskegee where she worked as a tenant farmer as well as a neighborhood doctor. At the plantation, Wright created a community club that worked with her fellow community members to gather up funds to buy food during certain holidays such as Christmas in order to feed the families in the community.

Historical Context

Racial discrimination in Great Depression Era

The Great Depression destroyed the livelihoods of many American families, especially for African-American families. During the year 1931, the white unemployment rate was 31.7% whereas the black unemployment rate was much higher being well-over 50 percent. Due to this massive economic downturn, many African-American families migrated to the North in hopes of job opportunities. However, many of these jobs were instead given to White workers due to discrimination. Moreover, African-American women faced even larger racial discrimination as the unemployment rates for African-American women living in urban areas was twice the unemployment rates of white women living in urban areas. The racial discrimination of the Great Depression era existed even within the New Deal policies where many African-American families were unable to obtain welfare benefits or enough welfare benefits to escape poverty. This was true in Wright’s case, as she was forced, due to the economic downturn as well as her meager income as a tenant farmer, to create a community club with her neighbors to gather funds and buy bulks of food for all their families in order to survive through the Great Depression era.

Racial disparities in access to medicine

Although medicine and licensed medical treatment wasn’t accessible to many people during the early 1900s, this problem was especially true for African-American families. Due to major health disparities between white and black families such as access to medicine or a licensed medical practitioner, African-American households had a significantly lower life expectancy rate and a much higher infant mortality rate. During the early 1900s, diseases such as whooping cough, chicken pox, and measles as well as others were common, especially in young children. During Wright’s life, at one point, all of her children were infected by either whooping cough or chicken pox. Moreover, two of her daughters died due to sickness, one at the age of 3 and the other at the age of 21. Their deaths caused a significant amount of heartbreak to Wright as she said she felt hopeless, yet unwilling to lose her children. Wright’s struggle in life with disease led her to become a neighborhood doctor on the plantation in Tuskegee.

Woman’s role

Women during the late 1800s to the early 1900s were not given a variety of opportunities from education to jobs. Especially African-American women, most who grew up working in the fields of their parents who were tenant farmers. Many African-American women were forced to discontinue their education in order to help their parents with their crops as well as to get married early. As their parents worked as tenant farmers, so did many African-American women who on their narrow path were led to the work of farming. Similarly, Wright dropped out of elementary school and married at the age of 18. Her first husband died, and as a African-American mother of eleven children with limited options, sought to remarry. Yet shortly after, Wright divorced her husband, Eddie, because she had to become the breadwinner for her family to properly feed her children. Wright, limited by her options as an African-American woman, found herself as a tenant farmer. Wright said she wanted her children to be given the same luxury she was given as a child, which was an abundance of food and clothes. Her determination and her responsibility for her children as a single-mother led her from to become a hard-working farmer and a cheerful soul in her community.

References

Ward, Sarah., "Women and Work: African American Women in Depression Era America", (Master’s thesis, CUNY Academic Works, 2018).[AF1] https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2625

Thomas, Stephen B, and Erica Casper. “The Burdens of Race and History on Black People's Health 400 Years After Jamestown.” American journal of public health vol. 109, no.10 (2019): 1346-1347.

Bloome, Deirdre, and Christopher Muller. “Tenancy and African American Marriage in the Postbellum South.” Demography vol. 52,5 (2015): 1409-30. doi:10.1007/s13524-015-0414-1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4607663/pdf/nihms720357.pdf

David E. Conrad., “Tenant Farming and Sharecropping.,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture., https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=TE009.

Amistad Digital Resource. “The Great Depression.” (2009). Retrieved October 9, 2020., from https://www.amistadresource.org/plantation_to_ghetto/the_great_depression.html

Perry, Rhussus L. “A Day with Lula Wright.” UNC University Libraries, n.d. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/03709/id/993/rec/1