Cyrus Bellus
“I was born in Mississippi in 1865 in Jefferson County. It was on the tenth of March. The slaves had to weave cotton and knit sox. Sometimes they would work all night, weaving cloth, and spinning thread. They would make cloth for all the hands on the place. My father and mother were both field hands. They were supposed to pick, the man, four hundred pounds of cotton, and the woman three hundred. If they didn’t come up to the task, they was took out and give a whipping. My own earliest recollections was of picking cotton…” – Cyrus Bellus
A.J. Pesaro ’24
Civilizations in Africa, the Indus Valley, China, Peru, and India all had highly organized cotton farming systems, starting from as far back as 3000 BCE. Half of all textiles made today contain cotton and the global cotton industry employs 350 million workers. China is the main producer of cotton today, but the United States has recently banned imports of cotton from the Xinjiang region because of the forced labor of the ethnic minority Uyghur people.
Sources
- Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 1, Abbott-Byrd. November-December, 1936. www.loc.gov/item/mesn021
- The Guardian, US ban on cotton from forced Uyghur labour comes into force, June 21, 2022
- Can the cotton industry protect its workforce in a changing climate? Reuters, September 18, 2023
