“The Farmers Didn’t Particularly Care for Us”: Oral Narrative and the Grass Roots Recovery of African American Migrant Farm Labor History in Central Pennsylvania

The Reverend Robert Woodall can still remember the rattlesnakes that he killed, sometimes beneath the car where his small children had to stay while he and his wife worked in the fields picking apples in central Pennsylvania. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Woodall had left behind the life of a sharecropper in Mississippi to become a migrant farm worker. Each year, he would begin harvesting crops in Florida and then gradually move north along the Atlantic coast, picking oranges, peaches, apples, and any other crop that happened to be in season. He ended in late summer to mid-autumn picking apples in southcentral Pennsylvania’s Adams County. Woodall and his wife often had trouble finding child daycare while they worked. When this happened, the Woodall children had to come to the fields and stay by the car beneath the shade of a tree, out among the rattlesnakes.¹

Lack of adequate childcare is just one of many problems associated with a system of harvesting dependent upon migrant farm labor. To most consumers, migrant farm workers provide the invisible hands that produce the affordable fruits and vegetables that end up being stocked on grocery store shelves. Yet workers who move from farm to farm harvesting each year face chronic troubles finding adequate housing, safe transportation, and health care. They are perpetual “outsiders” wherever they move, and in the United States race and citizenship operate as identifiers that reinforce this outsider status. Their transience and disconnection from local support networks often leave them vulnerable to exploitative “crew leaders” and unscrupulous employers.

These issues are endemic to migrant labor systems, not only in the United States, but throughout the world.² They formed a significant portion of Carey McWilliams’s critique of migrant farm labor in California articulated in his best-selling book Factories in the Field in 1939.³ Despite his observations, and despite numerous reforms, regulations, nonprofit direct service, community organizing, and state interventions, these conditions continued into the 1950s, 1960s, and persist to this day.

Nevertheless, throughout the history of migrant farm labor, there have been activists who have challenged the system. The most well known was the farm worker movement in California during the 1960s and 1970s led by Cesar Chavez and other Chicano labor leaders. This uprising of migrant workers eventually led to the formation of the United Farm Workers union and the passage of the most significant migrant farm labor laws in the nation.

Gaining less attention has been the migrant farm labor system along the East Coast in places like Pennsylvania. Here migrant workers have toiled in smaller numbers than in California, and they have played a less central role within state, regional, and global economies. Yet, as in California, activists have demanded reforms within Pennsylvania’s arrangement of migrant farm labor, a system characterized by poor housing conditions, lack of childcare and educational opportunities, and a corrupt crew-leader system. One such movement for reform emerged out of an African American community in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, not far from where Woodall picked apples. The leaders of this movement came from Carlisle’s Shiloh Baptist Church, and were led by Rev. Joseph Haggler Jr. None of these people were themselves farm workers, but they were African American, and this helped to establish common identity with a majority of farm laborers who arrived in Pennsylvania in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

While much of the history of migrant farm labor in Pennsylvania is contained in official sources like the state archives, oral histories with farm workers and those involved in the Shiloh migrant aid program have helped to reveal this hidden history of African American farm labor. These interviews illustrate how the migrant program at Shiloh went beyond services provided to black migrant workers. Those who aided migrant farm workers remember themselves experiencing a change of consciousness, learning about an entire labor system that existed only a few miles from their homes, but that was almost entirely hidden from view. Those...