// White Privilege // Hard Working Americans From the Beginning //

Archie Love, a worker at Springstein Mill in Chester, South Carolina, 1908.

Flickr/trialsanderrors

There's a lot to see in the eyes of this young man. The location of this photo was not documented, but it was likely taken at the Springstein Mill Village, also in Chester. When the photographer inquired about this boy's age, the boy hesitated and answered, "fourteen." At the time of this photo he'd been working in the mill for five years; his first six months he worked nights.

 Young doffers at Mollahan Mill in Newberry, South Carolina, 1908.

Flickr/Children's Bureau Centennial Follow

Young boys were often assigned the job of "doffer" at the mill. A "doffer" is someone who removes bobbins, spindles and pirns holding spun fiber (thread-like) from the spinning frame and then replaces them with empty ones.

 Emmett Capps stops to pose for a photograph in Spartanburg, South Carolina, May 1912.

Library of Congress/LOT 7479, v. 5, no. 2966 [P&P]

This young boy worked in the spinning room at Beaumont Mill in Spartanburg. He's walking about town with no shoes and seems to have an injury on his left ankle.

 In this vintage photo from a South Carolina mill, a young boy is tending carding equipment in a spinning room.

Flickr/Richland Library

A man by the name of Lewis Wickes Hine was a social photographer and was employed to document illegal child labor practices in the mills in the Carolinas. At the time, it was illegal to employ anyone under the age of 12 in a spinning room. This young boy is covered in lint. Carding machines took raw cotton and smashed it into flat sheets (cards). Workers in this stage of the process often inhaled a lot of lint and were often diagnosed with a condition known as "brown lung."

 WHITE PRIVILEGE ?? 

Work hard. Stay in school. Pray at night. 

AMEN