Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott: Second and third grade children being made up for their Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day festivities. Ashwood Plantations, South Carolina. 1939.

Description with photograph: " It shows a slightly bewildered group of white southern school kids gathering around their teacher to have blackface makeup put on their face and arms, and one little girl, looking in a mirror, scrutinizing her teacher's work. It's shocking and repugnant.

The more you look at it, the more disturbing it becomes. When Marion Post Wolcott made the photo, in 1939, while she was working for Roy Stryker's legendary documentary project at the Farm Security Administration [FSA], there was nothing shocking about it.

The photo captured perfectly ordinary preparations for a perfectly ordinary school festival. Most people who saw it would probably have been charmed. Seventy-one years ago, the white kids in blackface were cute."