| Summary: | John Garner was raised on a plantation. His father was a sharecropper. He recalls planting cotton, working behind a mule and digging ditches. Due to his field work, he was only able to attend school two months out of the year. With sharecropping, Garner says that families would often stay in debt to the landlord and the landlord would sometimes take the families' hogs and cows for his debt. Garner also recalls 1914 and 1915 as the years when the boll weevils destroyed the cotton fields. Farmers often tried to destroy the boll weevil by burning the fields. During this time, Garner left the country and went to work in the coal mine and later worked in the steel mill. He calls this period an "exodus" because so many workers left farms. He goes on to say that the boll weevil freed people because it got them off the farm. He also recalls segregation in Birmingham and remembers once going to Cincinnati and seeing whites and blacks sitting together. He said this was the first time he knew that "everybody was everybody" above the Mason-Dixon Line. He also recounts several illustrative stories related to racial relations in Birmingham. Garner also discusses joining the Communist Party in Birmingham. He offers his thoughts on taxes, revolution and Reagan. He describes being recruited by Soviet agents and being taught about liberation. After joining the party, he was not allowed to use his real name and due to segregation was unable to go to meetings. He was given assignments by the agents; his assignment involved distributing The Daily Worker and other pamphlets. He also recalls life during The Depression. He says that when workers were not able to work in the mill, they were sometimes given "pity slips" that would serve as $1.25 of credit.The digitization of this collection was funded by a gift from EBSCO Industries.
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