Family Grading and Stripping Tobacco
Family Grading and stripping tobacco,
Orange County, North Carolina, September, 1939.
Photo by Marion Post, Farm Security Administration.
African peoples raised tobacco in Cuba and the United States during and
after slavery. They also worked in tobacco factories producing cigars
and cigarettes. Enslaved Africans in Haiti and Cuba introduced tobacco,
a native American product, to European sailors as early as the sixteenth
century. By the late 1600s, tobacco had become a major export crop in
Cuba, Virginia, Maryland, and later, North Carolina.