Eastern Shore Migrant Workers, Summer 1965
Gren Whitman • July 21, 2020
Basing ourselves in a rented house in Denton over the summer of 1965, Steve Fraser and I took a close look at the Eastern Shore’s migrant labor system. We talked extensively with workers, crew leaders, and local farmers in 17 migrant labor camps in Maryland’s Caroline and Dorchester counties. I was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staff member and Steve was a summer volunteer with SNCC.
The camps included Tanyard Road North, Richardson Road, Shiloh (an old religious camp meeting ground), Preston, Friendship, Glime Brothers’, Spencer Jones’s, Buck Andrews’s, East New Market, and John Hurst’s. We visited some as many as six times.
Most of the workers were African Americans bused in crews from Florida’s Lake Okeechobee area and elsewhere across the South. Some crews consisted of families; others were single men and women. We encountered a few Spanish-speakers and once, to our surprise, an all-white crew. We found ourselves talking with workers “who can’t buy in a store what they pick in a field.” We entered a camp near Hurlock “where people live in rotting chicken houses.”
At the end of the summer, we reported what we had learned to SNCC’s national office in Atlanta, and here are some excerpts:
• “Generally, an Eastern Shore farm worker feels lucky if he can bring $5 out of the fields for a day’s work. His ‘big money,’ his $15-to-$20 a day, is made during the ‘glut week,’ when cucumbers are going out and tomatoes are coming in, when there is work all morning and all afternoon instead of two or three hours’ work early in the morning with the rest of the day off.
• “The migrant farm worker is paid either hourly or piece rate, or a combination of the two, and he gets no overtime. Wages remain the root of his problem, and everything else, such as housing, or education, or health conditions, is peripheral. He receives no health or accident insurance. Coverage under Social Security is spotty and inadequate because his job is not covered by the national minimum wage law. He is segregated in his own community, on the highways and in the labor camps, of which he owns nothing. His wife and his children also work long hours in the fields. His formal education is sporadic at best. He is in fact a slave the growers rent.
• “On the Eastern Shore, the principal crops which need human labor for harvesting are tomatoes and cucumbers. Until a tomato plant is developed which ripens all at the same time, the idea of a picking machine is ludicrous. Cucumbers, which on the Shore are used for pickles, must be picked when they’re three inches long. A cucumber field is picked over perhaps twenty times because a machine cannot tell the difference between a three-inch cuke and a six-inch cuke.
• “Approximately 250,000 people who work as migrant and seasonal farm laborers on America’s East Coast have a yearly income of $500-$800. They travel and live and work in every state from Florida to Maine and fare ill everywhere they go. Wages are rarely above subsistence level, even in such liberal states as New York and New Jersey. Conditions in labor camps vary from state to state, but they are never more than barely decent, and most of them are abominable. About the only variance in a farm worker’s life is the crop and the season.
• “Farm workers have been excluded from our society simply because they are not paid enough to live, only to survive as they pick tomatoes and cucumbers in Maryland, as they harvest apples and potatoes in New York or oranges and grapefruit in Florida, as they beg for public assistance in Virginia, as they are jailed for vagrancy in North Carolina, as they die for lack of medical care in New Jersey, or are killed in a collision in Georgia, as they are born in the back of a school bus travelling through South Carolina.”
This report, of course, was written 55 years ago. Since then, vegetable farming on the Eastern Shore of Maryland has mostly disappeared. No more fields of tomatoes, cucumbers, and green beans. Corn and soybeans are the two major crops, neither of which requires harvesting by hand. Gone also are the labor camps, and no more ancient school buses carrying migrants from farm to farm.
As a community organizer, journalist, administrator, project planner/manager, and consultant, Gren Whitman has led neighborhood, umbrella, public interest, and political committees and groups, and worked for civil rights and anti-war organizations.
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
Right now, Congress is working on a fast-track bill that would make historic cuts to basic needs programs in order to finance another round of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.
The House Agriculture Committee recently voted, along party lines, to advance legislation that would cut as much as $300 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, helping more than 41 million people in the U.S. pay for food. With potential cuts this large, it helps to know who benefits from this program in Maryland, and who would lose this assistance. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compiled data on SNAP beneficiaries by congressional district, cited below, and produced the Maryland state datasheet , shown below. In Maryland, in 2023-24, 1 in 9 people lived in a household with SNAP benefits. In Maryland’s First Congressional District, in 2023-24: Almost 34,000 households used SNAP benefits. Of those households, 43% had at least one senior (over age 60). 29% of SNAP recipients were people of color. 15% were Black, non-Hispanic, higher than 11.8% nationally. 6% were Hispanic (19.4% nationally). There were 24,700 total veterans (ages 18-64). Of those, 2,200 lived in households that used SNAP benefits (9%). The CBPP SNAP datasheet for Maryland is below. See data from all the states and download factsheets here.
Apparently, some people think that the GOP’s “big beautiful bill” is a foregone conclusion, and that the struggle over the budget and Trump’s agenda is over and done. Not true. On Sunday night, the bill — given the alternate name “Big Bad Bullsh*t Bill” by the Democratic Women’s Caucus — was voted out of the House Budget Committee. The GOP plan is to pass this legislation in the House before Memorial Day. But that’s not the end of it. As Jessica Craven explained in her Chop Wood Carry Water column: “Remember, we have at least six weeks left in this process. The bill has to: Pass the House, Then head to the Senate where it will likely be rewritten almost completely, Then be passed there, Then be brought back to the House for reconciliation, And then, if the House changes that version at all, Go back to the Senate for another vote.” She adds, “Every step of that process is a place for us to kill it.” The bill is over a thousand pages long, and the American people will not get a chance to read it until it has passed the House. But, thanks to 5Calls , we know it includes:
Let's talk about our Eastern Shore Delegation, the representatives who are supposed to fight for our nine Shore counties in Annapolis, and what they actually got up to this session.
For the first time in recent memory, Virginia Democrats have candidates running in all 100 House of Delegates districts — a milestone party leaders and grassroots organizers say reflects rising momentum as President Donald Trump’s second term continues to galvanize opposition.
The 447th legislative session of the Maryland General Assembly adjourned on April 8. This End of Session Report highlights the work Shore Progress has done to fight for working families and bring real results home to the Shore. Over the 90-day session, lawmakers debated 1,901 bills and passed 878 into law. Shore Progress and members supported legislation that delivers for the Eastern Shore, protecting our environment, expanding access to housing and healthcare, strengthening workers’ rights, and more. Shore Progress Supported Legislation By The Numbers: Over 60 pieces of our backed legislation were passed. Another 15 passed in one Chamber but not the other. Legislation details are below, past the budget section. The 2026 Maryland State Budget How We Got Here: Maryland’s budget problems didn’t start overnight. They began under Governor Larry Hogan. Governor Hogan expanded the state budget yearly but blocked the legislature from moving money around or making common-sense changes. Instead of fixing the structural issues, Hogan used federal covid relief funds to hide the cracks and drained our state’s savings from $5.5 billion to $2.3 billion to boost his image before leaving office. How Trump/Musk Made It Worse: Maryland is facing a new fiscal crisis driven by the Trump–Musk administration, whose trade wars, tariff policies, and deep federal cuts have hit us harder than most, costing the state over 30,000 jobs, shuttering offices, and erasing promised investments. A University of Maryland study estimates Trump’s tariffs alone could cost us $2 billion, and those federal cuts have already added $300 million to our budget deficit. Covid aid gave us a short-term boost and even created a fake surplus under Hogan, but that money is gone, while housing, healthcare, and college prices keep rising. The Trump–Musk White House is only making things worse by slashing funding, gutting services, and eliminating research that Marylanders rely on. How The State Budget Fixes These Issues: This year, Maryland faced a $3 billion budget gap, and the General Assembly fixed it with a smart mix of cuts and fair new revenue, while protecting working families, schools, and health care. The 2025 Budget cuts $1.9 billion ($400 million less than last year) without gutting services people rely on. The General Assembly raised $1.2 billion in fair new revenue, mostly from the wealthiest Marylanders. The Budget ended with a $350 million surplus, plus $2.4 billion saved in the Rainy Day Fund (more than 9% of general fund revenue), which came in $7 million above what the Spending Affordability Committee called for. The budget protects funding for our schools, health care, transit, and public workers. The budget delivers real wins: $800 million more annually for transit and infrastructure, plus $500 million for long-term transportation needs. It invests $9.7 billion in public schools and boosts local education aid by $572.5 million, a 7% increase. If current revenue trends hold, no new taxes will be needed next session. Even better, 94% of Marylanders will see a tax cut or no change, while only the wealthiest 5% will finally pay their fair share. The tax system is smarter now. We’re: Taxing IT and data services like Texas and D.C. do; Raising taxes on cannabis and sports betting, not groceries or medicine; and Letting counties adjust income taxes. The budget also restores critical funding: $122 million for teacher planning $15 million for cancer research $11 million for crime victims $7 million for local business zones, and Continued support for public TV, the arts, and BCCC The budget invests in People with disabilities, with $181 million in services Growing private-sector jobs with $139 million in funding, including $27.5 million for quantum tech, $16 million for the Sunny Day Fund, and $10 million for infrastructure loans. Health care is protected for 1.5 million Marylanders, with $15.6 billion for Medicaid and higher provider pay. Public safety is getting a boost too, with $60 million for victim services, $5.5 million for juvenile services, and $5 million for parole and probation staffing. This budget also tackles climate change with $100 million for clean energy and solar projects, and $200 million in potential ratepayer relief. Public workers get a well-deserved raise, with $200 million in salary increases, including a 1% COLA and ~2.5% raises for union workers. The ultra-wealthy will finally chip in to pay for it: People earning over $750,000 will pay more, Millionaires will pay 6.5%, and Capital gains over $350,000 get a 2% surcharge. Deductions are capped for high earners, but working families can still deduct student loans, medical debt, and donations. This budget is bold, fair, and built to last. That’s why Shore Progress proudly supports it. Click on the arrows below for details in each section.
