Patricia Goudvis photograph collection

The Patricia Goudvis’ photograph collection captures the juncture between rural, working class agricultural life, particularly on the outskirts of former plantations and sugarcane mills, and white suburban life. Some photos in this collection contain graphic, racist imagery, particularly of a Golliwog doll being noosed to a lamp post in Houma.

On May 20th, 1974, in Houma, Louisiana, Goudvis visited the USDA hearing that decided annual wages for cane workers in accordance with the Sugar Act of 1948 a long-contested USDA wage determination policy. There, she photographed the testimonies of Father William Crumley, lifelong social justice and environmental sustainability advocate, and Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion, Henry Pelet, and Lorna Bourg, co-founders of the Southern Mutual Help Association, Inc. (SMHA). The hearing also featured Gustave Rhodes, president of SMHA and a sugar mill worker photographed by Goudvis in Napoleonville. Rhodes, a former cane cutter at Elm Hall plantation in Napoleonville, and Huet P. Freeman, a cane worker at Hard Times plantation in Tensas Parish, sued “Earl Butz and the United States Department of Agriculture for back wages owed them and the state’s 22,000 field workers.” The US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the workers in 1972. Rhodes and his wife Beverly continued their advocacy as part of the SMHA and in independent efforts to register other plantation workers to vote and to organize.

After Louisiana, Goudvis traveled to Forest and Jackson, Mississippi where she photographed poultry processing workers on the assembly line, in their homes, and on the picket line with the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Union (MPWU). The independent and interracial union formed on May 10th, 1972 after Southeastern Poultry Packers workers led a spontaneous six-week strike to protest low wages and poor working conditions. Her photographs include black and white and color portraits of Black union leaders including MPWU President Merle Barber, Vice-president Matthew Nicks and lead organizer John Walker. She also photographed Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) sponsored Grassroots Organizing Work (GROW) organizers Walter Collins and Tonny Algood, who supported the fledgling union. She created a slideshow presentation featuring 92 images including these portraits, graphic photographs of processing work, images of the facilities where MPWU operated, and images of workers picketing in the rain. Barber and Nicks narrate the slideshow and detail the union’s history and their struggle at the time for workers’ compensation for pesticide poisoning.

In Mississippi, Goudvis photographed the everyday life and labor of horse-and-plow farmers, street cleaners, Head Start and day care programs, police officers, aldermen, and general street scenes of Bolton and Mendenhall, MS. In Mendenhall, MS, Goudvis photographed patients in the Mendenhall clinic, owners/clerks and patrons of the Simpson Country Co-op Store, as well as the Voice of Calvary Bible Institute and its adjacent farm. In Bolton, MS, Goudvis photographed a town hall meeting featuring Bennie G. Thompson, then-mayor of Bolton, MS, and since 1993, the U.S. Representative to Mississippi’s 2nd congressional district, the only majority-Black district in Mississippi. In 1973, Bolton was elected as mayor alongside an election where Black citizens of Bolton won all five spots on the Board of Aldermen and the City Clerk's office. To date, Thompson is “the longest-serving African-American elected official in the State of Mississippi and the lone Democrat in the Mississippi Congressional Delegation.”

Her photographs of the Greene-Hale Sewing Cooperative in Greensboro illustrate the process of industrial clothing production and the scale of the cooperative’s operations. By 1980 the cooperative had employed over 3,000 Black women, some of whom went on to other jobs, so it is possible that the transient nature of the workforce made individuals harder to identify. Rows of Black women workers sew the garments, but the camera also lingers on some individual faces. Some photographs show women discussing operations with a lighter skinned man.

Goudvis’ photographs of the Freedom Quilting Bee in Alberta, Alabama illustrate the collective process of quilting, from selecting fabric to laying out the design to sewing it together. Moreover, her black and white and color portraits of workers include figures like Quilting Bee co-founder Estelle Witherspoon, who committed civil disobedience and marched from Selma to Montgomery. The images also include scenes of Black children resting and playing at the co-op building’s daycare, which was the area’s only day care center until it closed in January 1996. Poor parents bartered with crops to use the service if they could not pay the fee.

In Union Springs, Alabama, Goudvis visited feeder pig farmers Mr. and Mrs. Bouie, whose cooperative farm was affiliated with the Southeast Alabama Self-Help Association (SEASHA). SEASHA originated in 1967 with links to the Tuskegee Institute’s educational programs. One image shows an outpost of the organization in Tuskegee, but many simply illustrate their small family farm and a number of pigs. The small cooperatives Goudvis photographed in Georgia like the West Georgia Feeder Pig Farm cooperative and the Shepherd Broom Factory also illustrate the impact of the FSC on individual rural Black families and communities.

In Epes, Sumter County, Alabama, Goudvis photographed farm and construction workers, as well as the FSC’s Rural Training and Research Center (RTRC) located there. The RTRC was established in 1971 after a three-year battle in court between FSC leadership and the Panola Land Buying Association, and the land’s previous white ownership. Original staff—Wendell Paris, George and Alice Paris, John Zippert and Carol Prejean Zippert, and Jim Jones—and their families lived on the premises, eventually growing the center from “a classroom and demonstration farm … to .. administrative offices; a dormitory to house eighty trainees; cafeteria and classroom space; a materials reproduction center, including presses; a darkroom, videotape and artist studio; as well as recreation and living areas.” The RTRC also provided legal counsel and agricultural and financial literacy through demos of crop management and rotation, greenhouse production, pig and cow production and management, as well as accounting, land development and property rights, and loan packaging. The RTRC remains in Sumter County, owning over 1,300 acres of land and endowed with similar agricultural programming and scholarships for youth engagement.

Goudvis’ black and white and color photographs of the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association (GPA) woodcutters felling trees and clearing land near Mobile, Alabama emphasize the backbreaking nature of their work. While the union emphasized interracial organizing, the workers appear to be predominantly Black. She photographed the exteriors of the International Paper Company Mill and Scott Paper Company Mill, both sites targeted by union pickets during the 1973 strike. She photographed the union’s Vice President Rev. C.L. Kimbrough at a worksite and Mrs. Carney, wife of GPA President Delbert Carney in Chatom at GTA headquarters.

In Wadesboro, North Carolina, Goudvis photographed National Sharecroppers Fund Director Jim Pierce, a young Black yam farmer named Bennie Gaddy, and farm manager Chris Dixon.