While designed to help struggling farm families, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) deepened the crisis faced by “tenant farmers” who farmed on rented land. To eliminate surplus and stabilize prices, the AAA included incentives for landowners to reduce production by culling their herds and leaving their fields fallow. In the South, where tenancy and sharecropping had prevailed since Reconstruction, landowners opted to evict families growing crops on their land. Thousands of farm families, Black and white, were pushed off land they had called home for generations, joining the stream of displaced migrants moving west.

Recognizing the scale of the displacement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture attempted to provide emergency housing for white displaced tenant farmers through initiatives like the Subsistence Homestead Program and, later, the Resettlement Administration. The government excluded Black farmers and others from these planned agricultural communities, leaving them with nowhere to go and seeding generational poverty.