[African American Family at Gee's Bend, Alabama]

Captured by photojournalist Arthur Rothstein in 1937 while on assignment in the rural community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, this photograph remains a powerful portrayal of the poverty experienced by Southern Black communities in the early 20th century, amid Jim Crow segregation and the Great Depression. One of nearly fifty photographs Rothstein took during his Farm Security Administration (FSA)-commissioned visit, it shows a large, multigenerational family posed in front of their log cabin homes. While the identities of the subjects are unconfirmed, 2025 Curationist Critic of Color Wendyliz Martinez speculates that the young girl on the far right may be Artelia Bendolph—a recognizable figure from another Rothstein portrait— based on the similarity of her dress collar. Might this be her family, her grandparents, Old Man Joseph and Indiana Bendolph; her mother, Daisey Wilcox; or her aunts, uncles, siblings or cousins? If not the Bendolph family, could they, like many others in Gee's Bend, carry the surname Pettway, inherited from Mark H. Pettway, the white landowner who enslaved the ancestors of many residents?

After emancipation, many Gee's Bend residents became sharecroppers, renting land from absentee white landowners and building community on the grounds of the former Pettway plantation. Despite ongoing hardships—severe poverty, drought, and food insecurity among them—families like the one pictured here found strength in communal life and close kinship ties that spanned generations. Above the family, a burlap sack hangs from a tree branch, indicating a traditional method of curing for meat shared by the family. In 1941, the prominent Black author and activist Richard Wright included this photograph in 12 Million Black Voices, a photo documentary combining FSA images with his own text. In his reflection beneath this image, Wright emphasizes the deep importance of familial bonds to Black survival: "There is nothing— no ownership or lust for power—that stands between us and our kin."