While I wasn't alive during the Depression I am old enough to remember seeing people both blacks and whites in the early '50's bent over in the hot dusty fields picking cotton like they did in the 1860's. I remember seeing them living in the shanty shacks that they called home. A few of those shacks still stand abandoned and overgrown along lonely back roads. There weren't many factories in the south that built Tanks, or Airplanes, for "Rosie the riveter" to work on. That was mostly up north and in California. So our depression lasted into the '50's because of the railroad taxes.
We were not rich but my daddy was fortunate enough to have gotten a good job working for the Railroad during the war (WW II) or we would have probably been in their shoes also, except for the good Lord's Blessings. All I know is that I was impressed with the thought that there are people in this world who while free, because of circumatances, are worst off than slaves. It is a sad thing that it the 1950's you were encouraged to get a high School education to be able to get a better job. Before then there were no jobs in the south that required a high School education. You were either going to either move away, or work in the jobs that were available, usually sharecropping.