California’s Latinx farmworkers have been the subjects of many documentary projects over the years, but very few people documented the history of Black farmworkers in the state. Now, an exhibition at the Fresno Museum of Art called Black Migrants features never-before-seen photographs by Ernest Lowe that provide a glimpse of a story largely left out of California’s agricultural memory.

The photos’ subjects hailed from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana, fleeing the Jim Crow South and the injustice of slavery disguised as tenant farming. In the 1930s and ’40s, thousands of African American families undertook the long migration, with their sights set on the open land of rural California, higher piece rates for cotton picking, and the promise of freedom. There, they congregated into cotton farm labor camps dispersed across the Central Valley that went on to become communities including Teviston, Pixley, and Dos Palos.

Photo © Ernest Lowe

In the early 1960s, Lowe was a young documentary photographer working with Berkeley’s KPFA public radio. He took to the fields capturing the reality of these migrants’ lives: racism, backbreaking labor, and some of the most extreme poverty in the nation. Yet Lowe’s photographs also portray the joy, humanity, and dignity of these forgotten communities, surviving all this time in the state’s margins.

Civil Eats recently spoke with Lowe, who describes his career as “applying my creativity to the task of changing the world toward a more humane, just, peaceful, and democratic place.” The historic exhibition runs through January 6, 2019.

What made you want to photograph these workers?

In the early ’60s, I’d been studying documentary photography and filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute. Dorothea Lange came in as a guest teacher in one of our classes, and I was very inspired by her work. Then I heard a radio show on KPFA [about] a field worker for American Friends Service Committee [named] Bard McAllister, who was saying, “Someone should come to the fields and take pictures again, the conditions haven’t changed much since the 1930s.” So I committed to do that.

Then I was working for KPFA, and so I started doing field recordings and taking pictures on weekends, holidays, time-off. I traveled up and down the Central Valley and into the Salinas Valley, going out into the fields and orchards, going to the camps along rivers and the settlements. I covered the early unionization effort before Cesar Chavez went public, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. I was one of the few people photographing this effort.

Photo © Ernest Lowe

But I also photographed Black farmworkers. At that time, most people were focusing on the Anglos and Hispanic farm workers and not paying much attention to the African Americans in the Valley. So, in 1964, I spent two months photographing in one of these communities, called Teviston, off Highway 99.

All of that culminated at a major exhibition at the de Young Museum in 1966. It was a multimedia exhibition with hundreds of photographs on the walls, [including] the contents of [an abandoned] farmworker shack. It was a controversial exhibition! The board of the de Young tried to cancel it. I threatened a city-wide exhibit in storefronts, and they decided they’d rather have the show than that alternative. [Laughs.]

The photographs from that time haven’t been seen until this year. Can you say more about why they’re on exhibit now?

In 2015, I got a call from Mark Arax, a brilliant investigative journalist who worked for the Los Angeles Times; he was a correspondent for the whole Valley. He had found my pictures and wanted to use them in a film he was doing on the Black Okies, focused on Teviston, and he was very pleased to find I had all these other historic photographs.

As we talked, I said I wanted to see if I could find any of the people I photographed in the ’60s. So he and a couple of other colleagues organized a visit, and we went to churches in Teviston and laid out pictures. In the second church, there were probably eight people who recognized themselves—it was this incredibly joyous thing.

Photo © Ernest Lowe

Then we did the same thing in South Dos Palos, near Fresno. I think we had at least nine to 10 people recognize themselves or their relatives. So we went back a second time, and we were photographing all this time and got wonderful pairs of pictures—you know, like a kid back in 1964 and in 2015. We found that the families that I had focused on had all managed to get out of farm labor and into service jobs, with just a few casualties along the way. So it was just thrilling to find these people who had grown up in such poverty living successful lives.