Abstract
During World War II, the POW labor program provided cotton planters in the lower Mississippi Valley with a temporary yet timely solution to an increasingly mobile local labor supply. While war prisoners worked in a variety of crops and non-agricultural industries, one of the greatest concentration of camps and captive workers devoted to a single crop occurred along the southern stretch of the Mississippi River. Cotton planters in Arkansas, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana secured over twelve thousand war prisoners from 1943 to 1946. German and Italian prisoners reinforced a labor system based on boundaries of color even as their presence in the fields revealed racial contradictions. Even as the inexperienced field hands undercut planter profits, exposed racial tensions, and undermined racialized notions of work, their presence helped to extend the life of an exploitative plantation economy. Despite the limited scope and dubious success rate of POW labor, cotton planters in the Deep South found a temporary workforce to hold a place on the plantation for African-American labor.
