Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section068/Leathy Lightsey

Overview

Leathy Lightsey was an African-American single mother of eight children who lived in Charlotte NC. She was interviewed by Cora Bennett and Mary Northrop on July 6th, 1939 as part of the Federal Writers Project.

Biography

Early Life

Leathy Lightsey grew up in the countryside of South Carolina. Her father worked on a farm, and Lightsey and her five other siblings would help him. Lightsey stopped going to school in the fourth grade because her mother died, and she was the oldest girl. It was her responsibility to take care of the home and care for her siblings. Leathy fondly remembers her childhood in the country. She recalls that the community would support each other in times of need. When her family all got Malaria Fever, a potentially deadly disease, their neighbors came and helped out.

Adulthood

Lightsey got married and moved to Charlotte with her husband. Lightsey didn’t want to leave the countryside, but urban areas promised more job opportunities and a better life. She and her husband had eight children together. At the time of the interview, Lightsey and her family had lived in Charlotte for seventeen years. Some years had been successful while others were a struggle.

Lightsey’s husband had misunderstood mental health issues. He was described as always worried and that his mind would come and go. As a result, she had to send him to a mental asylum. This forced her to take care of eight children on her own. She had to take her two oldest children out of school to take care of the younger children while Lightsey worked. She worked at a canning project, but was hoping to return to her job in the cafeteria at the local school when the school year started up again. This job paid barely enough for the family to get by. All nine of them rented a 3-room home that didn’t have electricity or water. While it was a less than ideal situation, Lightsey refused to let it break her spirit. She insisted that no matter what, they could make it by.

Social Issues

Mental Health & Mental Institutions

In the wake of World War I, mental health was receiving increased attention. World War I was the first time that “shell shock” was legitimized. “Shell shock” (now known as PTSD) could have frightening effects which led to heightened awareness and fear of all mental illness. There was also a shift in beliefs from believing the cause of mental illness was personal predisposition to the belief that environmental factors could cause mental illness.

As a result of the war, mental asylums became common, but not all mental asylums were created equal. Private asylums were clean and used modern treatments while public asylums were “overcrowded and dirty, with bars on the windows. The staff was poorly paid and frequently treated patients harshly.” Which was counterproductive to helping the patients. The South was segregated at this time and African-Africans were forced to go to “colored” asylums.

Impact of Great Depression

The Great Depression caused an extremely high unemployment rate. This created a fierce competition for the remaining jobs. Many African-Americans flocked to cities and towns to find jobs, causing the proportion of African-Americans in cities to rise from “44 percent to 50 percent as an impact of the Great Depression.” African-African women had always faced discrimination when trying to find a job, but during the Great Depression this discrimination was heightened because new demographics entered the job market. White women who had previously been stay-at-home mothers were forced into the job market as a result of their husbands losing their jobs. This meant that African-American women were increasingly racially discriminated against because employers had the option of employing white women instead. African-American women had two forces working against them: race and gender. During the Great Depression the “preference for hiring whites, especially white males, rose quickly”.

Sharecropping was a difficult life for many African-American families, but they made the best of it by creating a community. This is a picture of an African-American sharecropper in 1935 which is a few years after when Lightsey and her family lived in the country.

Rural Life for African Americans in the South

The oppression and segregation in the South left African Americans very few options. Sharecropping was the most common path for African Americans in the South. However, this practice “confined generations of African-Americans to a life of unmitigated poverty and crushed the hopes of emancipated slaves and their progeny until the second World War era” Sharecropping created a bleak future for many African Americans, but these families made the best of it by “creat[ing] a sense of community. They worked together and ate together and were more willing to help out other sharecroppers.”

The limitations of sharecropping was not the only issue that rural African-Americans faced. There was also the issue of inadequate rural schools. Rural schools were limited by “low-quality teachers, the lack of age grading and organization, and an environment that ‘is too narrow to broaden the intellectual horizon of the pupil.’" African American children were frequently taken out of school early because working or helping out at home was viewed as more valuable than the insufficient education that they were receiving at school.