The power of the machine

Although the cotton picker was invented around 1850, it wasn’t until 1943 that it became useful enough to be put to work on farms.

Only in the early 1950s did the machine start to be introduced in the southern United States, and it quickly destroyed the market for the one thing vast numbers of Black workers in the South had to offer: their labor.

All this set off a migration of thousands of African Americans to the more industrialized cities of the North, such as Detroit, Chicago and New York, but also to other centers in the South that needed labor for their factories, such as Atlanta and Birmingham. This is the moment when the real emancipation of Black Americans, and their struggle for their rights, begins.

The introduction of this piece of technology, the cotton harvesting machine, probably explains the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

Does technology shape man?