Shared Crop: Life of a Black Tenant Farmer During Jim Crow

Illustrated with extraordinary works by outsider artists, Shared Crop is a gripping collection of stories about Shorty Lawson and his family, who lived in rural North Carolina during the Jim Crow era. Together the text and artwork paint a nuanced picture of the daily life of a Black tenant farmer, with the Lawsons’ own words providing the detail. Bathing without running water. Five buzzards following an exhausted man and mule. Identity, stored deep in her heart, released for racial reckoning.

Shorty’s story would be told in formal history as that of a laborer who fueled the tobacco economy from the 1950s to the 1970s. Yes, race and class constrained him, but his life was far richer, a character known throughout the community for his insistence that work was its own reward. His joys, make-do innovations, command of his territory, and the way he and Annie raised their children were legendary. He dispelled myths of white superiority, not by a calculated strategy, but rather by how he lived. In doing so, he challenged his children, those who worked with him, and everyone who knew of him, Black and White, landed and tenants. To each he left a legacy of a shared crop of steadfast lessons that might well guide us through troubled times.

Randolph T. Hester is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor or author of two dozen books including Design for Ecological Democracy and Inhabiting the Sacred in Everyday Life. Award-winning city designers of projects in Raleigh and Manteo, North Carolina, Los Angeles, California, and the East-Asian Australasian Flyway, Hester and his wife Marcia McNally founded and curate the Shorty Lawson Museum of the Black Tenant Farmer.