Harvest of Tears
by Betty Pelley Smith
An eyewitness to the
Racial Riots of 1930 in Sherman, Texas,
the author produced this work of fiction in an
effort to understand this horrible crime and
the people who committed it---
her friends and neighbors.
Historical Fiction
5.75 inches x 8.75 inches
400 pages; Paperback
ISBN 0975566768
Regular Price $15.95
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Takes a minute or two.
- Hunger stalked the land for the “Great Depression” was upon it, destroying the dignity and
security of a normally productive nation, settling down like a plague of locusts devouring fields
of harvest crops. One-third of the country’s 122 million people were ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-
clothed for approximately 12 million Americans were unemployed.
Unemployment in the United States reached its peak in 1933 with 24.9 percent of the labor
force out of work. More than a quarter million of these unemployed were Texans. Texans, loyal
and fiercely proud of their heritage, were haughtily aware that their land was a nation in itself
before becoming a state of the Union. They argued that they did not need “new deals” in Texas
from the federal government but only asked for a “square deal.”
Virgil’s profound proverb, “someday, perhaps, it may be pleasant to remember even these
things,” bears no particle of truth for those who survived these catastrophic years. Though
memories of the dust, drought, degradation, deprivation and the Depression have faded away
for the most part; still, millions of stories could be told of those troubled days in time. This, then,
is only one of those stories—about a few people in a small Texas town—one small town of this
vast country.
Harvest of Tears begins as a story of simple folk struggling to raise their children in a
difficult time. But underlying frustrations build as jobs are lost, suicides become common and
unspeakable squalor prevails, and the story and people living it explode.
- The author, Betty Pelley Smith was born and raised in Sherman, Texas. She writes, “I was 5
years old when I saw the Sherman Courthouse burn and saw a body hanging from a tree. In my
5-year-old mind, I remember thinking, ‘I thought he was black. All I see is white,’ as only white
bones were hanging there. I was haunted all my life by this sight. I wish I had never seen it. I
could not understand how anyone could do such a horrible thing. I promised myself someday to
write a book about it. I kept that promise and, in 1971, I began to write this book…It was a form
of therapy. Even now, 75 years later, I am so emotional about this that I shake as I write.”