Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section017/Ned Davis

Overview

Ned Davis was born in DeWeese, South Carolina on August 31, 1987. He was a successful owner of a beauty shop in Riverton, North Carolina and was a loving husband and father.

Biography

Early Life

Ned Davis was born in August of 1987 in DeWeese, South Carolina. His father was a share cropper there and his mother cared for him until she passed away shortly after the death of Ned's younger brother Ralph. After his mother passed, his grandmother cared for him for the next five years while his father was working. During Ned's youth, racism and segregation were prominent issues in the United States. People of color were severely underpaid for their labor and still mostly worked on plantations in the south as share croppers or working in the house for the upper class white family for cheap. In Ned's early life, he spent a majority of his time working inside the house of the family that owned Ned's father's plot of land. Ned only attended school through the third grade when he dropped out in order to find work.

Late Life and Career

As Ned grew older he and his father changed jobs often in hopes of finding better pay. Ned eventually met his first wife when he took a job as a cook for an upper class family. The two married and welcomed their first child a year later. After the birth of their child the family moved to West Virginia and welcomed a second child. Only a few months after their second child was born, Ned's wife passed away from complications with the pregnancy. A month and a half later, Ned remarried and the couple and children moved to North Carolina. It is here that Ned decided to follow his dream of creating and selling his own hair products and running his own salon. He and his wife learned to braid hair and his wife helped in the salon until the Great Depression hit and business slowed which forced her to return to her other job full time. Word quickly spread that a man was running a salon and dressing hair and Ned began attracting more customers out of curiosity until word spread about the efficiency and quality of Ned's work. After that business was booming and Ned ended up opening six salons in the surrounding towns and was the first African American beauty school approved by the state of North Carolina.

Social Issues

The Great Depression

The Great Depression lasted from 1929 until 1939 and no race could escape its effects, however, African Americans were one of the first to feel the wrath of the Great Depression. They were said to be "last hired, first fired" as they were the first group to experience wages and hours cut and they experienced the highest unemployment rate during the Great Depression. Additionally, African Americans had significantly less of a financial cushion to fall back on seeing as they were already underpaid. The Great Depression sparked a push for change among the African American community, it laid they ground work for the looming civil rights movements.

Sharecropping

Share cropping is a system where the landlord/plantation owner allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. There are many types of sharecropping but the most widely known one is the kind that was practiced in the rural south. Formally enslaved people who had nothing to their names when they were freed entered contracts with their plantation owners in hopes of making money however a majority of the time, the owners would set up an unfair agreement and the family that was living on the piece of land would never be able to repay their debt to the family. Sharecropping in the rural south was legalized slavery. Sharecropping in addition to the was the United States was set up the time restricted the economic mobility of these laborers.

Bibliography

• Cengage. n.d. “The 1900s Education: Overview.” Encyclopedia.com.
• History.com. 2018. “Segregation in the United States.” History.co.
• Moore, Thorn. 2008. “The African-American Church.” Prevention in Human Services 10, no. 1 (October): 147-167.
• Nelson, Viscount. 2015. Sharecropping, Ghetto, Slum: A History of Impoverished Blacks in the Twentieth-Century. N.p.: Xlibris.