Starving Where People Can See: The 1939 Bootheel Sharecroppers' Demonstration

Beginning on 10 January 1939, Missouri sharecropping families—1,300 women, men, and children—lived in makeshift shelters and out in the open on US highways 60 and 61. Their strategy of in situ exhibition manipulated conventions of minstrelsy through which media recognized them, successfully shaming landowners as violators of the moral economy.