Exhibition section

Housing Migrant Labor

Between 1939 and 1945, Seabrook Farms and neighboring agricultural enterprises in southern New Jersey, such as the Campbell Soup Company, received an enormous influx of seasonal migrant workers to meet increased wartime production needs. These workers came from Barbados, Jamaica, and other islands of the British West Indies, as well from Puerto Rico and the United States South. Taking advantage of its privileges as a wartime contractor, Seabrook used the War Manpower Commission, a federal agency created during the war, and the United States Information Service, a network of employment agencies, to manage its recruitment needs.

Seabrook Farms both built and leased housing accommodations for migrant laborers and their families. In 1942, Seabrook had constructed flimsy prefabricated housing – located in “Field No. 16” – that were occupied by white Southern migrant workers and their families. In an anonymous November 1943 letter to Helen Sater, a representative of the Labor Department who had investigated living conditions at Seabrook, a white woman from Tennessee complained that although she and other workers had been promised free housing upon their recruitment, the company was now charging them $2.75 a month for single rooms and $2 a month for doubles. According to the writer, company officials justified the new terms by appealing to racial anxieties. White workers, the Tennessee author noted, were told that the rent would “keep the place for people like us,” and keep out black tenants.

Black workers from the South and Caribbean lived in a temporary tent village, a vacated Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp, and the camp at Big Oaks. The camp at Big Oaks was administered by the Farm Security Administration and in June 1943 housed 516 single Jamaican men living in prefabricated wooden housing and converted barns with an additional 500 migrant black laborers from the South, including families, living in tents. Neither Seabrook nor the FSA provided adequate food storage or cooking facilities, and very few structures were equipped with indoor plumbing. Instead, tiny outhouses built over shallow pits served as communal toilets, and water faucets were located at the end of the street; hot water was not usually available. No childcare was offered to workers who had come to New Jersey with their families. No agency took responsibility for garbage collection, an arrangement which left fecal matter and waste rotting in piles around the perimeter of the camps. Although these accommodations were only supposed to be temporary, few of the migrant workers remained at Seabrook long enough to move into the better accommodations built by the Federal Public Housing Authority, which ended being occupied by paroled internees instead.

These deplorable sanitary conditions created a breeding ground for diseases, infections, and other health hazards. In addition to the investigation conducted by the Department of Labor along with the War Manpower Commission, Seabrook Farms also found itself facing scrutiny from the Consumers League of New Jersey, a reform agency that was pushing for the improved treatment of migrant workers in the states. As Mary Dyckman, President of the League quipped in a 1944 letter to the New Jersey Department of Health, after observing conditions at Big Oaks camp: “That place looks to me like a beautiful set up for the development of any epidemic.” Persistent pressure eventually led the New Jersey state legislature to pass a Migrant Labor Act in 1945, which provided baseline and enforceable standards for what companies had to provide to migrant workers. In Seabrook’s case, however, the legislation had little effect with the arrival of Issei and Nisei workers who were housed in permanent accommodations.

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Letter from Mary Dyckman to NJ Dept of Health, August 11, 1944

A letter from Mary Dyckman, President of the New Jersey Consumers League, to Dr. Julius Levy, a state health official, details sanitary conditions at the camps and notes racial discrimination in the allocation of housing. While housing conditions for laborers at Seabrook would improve with the opening of new residencies in 1944 and 1945, most migrant laborers would not benefit from improved conditions, with the newer housing going to Japanese parolees and Estonians instead.

Courtesy of the Consumers League of New Jersey Records, MC 1090, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries

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