Last week we met 6-year-old Louis Shuman, one of the many young newsies encountered by Lewis Wickes Hine during his trip to Dallas in October 1913 as he traveled the country documenting worker abuse for the National Child Labor Commission. Late last night, I dove back into the Library of Congress's vaults to look at more of Hine's pictures taken during that period and found this one of Rosy Phillips, who, wrote Hine, was a "fifteen year old spinner in a Dallas cotton mill."
Hine thought her name ironic, writing that "she was far from 'rosy' - thin, anaemic. Prematurely old." That boy with her, he wrote, is her 12-year-old brother -- Exie, he thought the name. The boy told the photographer, "I can't get a steady job, but I can help her all I want to." An astonishing photo.
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