NOAA has released a photo essay of historic photos to capture different experiences of African Americans in important fisheries in US history. The images range from the late 1800s to 1970. The Mirror has taken a subset of these images, focusing on oyster and crab
These images of men and women show a side to fisheries that we often forget, the human faces of those who capture, transform them to seafood.
Unloading oysters, Annapolis MD, 1970
Oyster abundance dropped in the 1960s as increased urbanization, pollution, and oyster parasites took their toll on wild populations. Other reasons for a decline in shucked oysters included the unionization of oyster shuckers in Virginia and a pay increase for the shuckers. Oyster populations rose in the 1970s and dropped again in the 1980s. Currently, efforts are underway.
Moving ahead to 1950, oysters were the highest valued fishery in the Chesapeake Bay states of Maryland and Virginia from the late 1800s until the 1970s. In small towns lining the Chesapeake Bay, both black and white people made their livings harvesting and processing oysters. In this photo, an oysterman is culturing oysters, collecting small ones and replanting them under better conditions to grow larger oysters faster. This practice, known as seeding, was a separate fishery from harvesting larger market oysters. Both fisheries contributed $11 million at harvest to the region’s economy in 1950. Photo credit: NOAA Photo Library Historical Fisheries Collection/Rex Gary Schmidt.
Onshore, factory workers turned fish into seafood by picking, cleaning, and canning. In 1968, about 88,000 people were employed processing and canning seafood nationwide which contributed over 1 billion dollars to the US economy. Photo credit: NOAA Photo Library Historical Fisheries Collection/Bob Williams.
Jack Trump says
March 3, 2019 at 2:07 pmSorry, I can’t help but throw blatant sarcasm at this one……………….I hope none of the current pages from The Va. Senate attend a meeting with Ms. Northam and are fed a crab or oyster. If they had any idea the poor wages those workers were paid……It might cause a deadly outbreak of ingested and imagined civil rights issues. OR, is that what actually happened and the fake news folks didn’t notice what they had for lunch ? Not that they would ever miss the real story……….
Elenora Giddings Ivory says
March 4, 2019 at 9:27 pmI am doing ancestry search. It is too bad the names of the people in the pictures are not listed. They could be long lost family.