Suffolk Closeup: Suffolk County's History Includes Migrant Labor Camps

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It was “a dark chapter in Long Island’s labor history,” as notes a just-published and important book, Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood.

The book relates the building and operation between the early 1940s and the 1960s of more than 100 migrant farm labor camps in Suffolk County. “Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York’s affluence,” it recounts.

“Dust for Blood” was how a farmworker “grimly described” receiving little or nothing in pay from crew leaders who recruited them. 

The book, authored by Mark A. Torres, who is also an attorney, is published by Arcadia Publishing and The History Press.

The migrant farm labor situation in Suffolk County was part of Edward R. Murrow’s landmark CBS News documentary Harvest of Shame broadcast in 1960 exposing the plight of migrant farm workers. “We present this report on Thanksgiving,” Murrow said at its start, “because were it not for the labor of the people you are going to meet, you might not starve, but your table would not be laden with the luxuries that we have all come to regard as essentials.”

There was a spotlight on the “largest and unquestionably most notorious migrant labor camp in Suffolk County,” notes the book, “the Cutchogue labor camp.” Fire tore through it a year after the Murrow broadcast, killing four migrant farmworkers, it states.  

Harvest of Shame was followed by a documentary in 1968 on National Educational Television (predecessor to PBS), What Harvest for the Reaper? It also focused on the Cutchogue camp. But it wasn’t just in Cutchogue and elsewhere in Southold and Riverhead towns where potato farming was widespread and thus there were many farmworker camps, 24 in Southold, 30 in Riverhead. By 1960, Mr. Torres relates, there were also 13 camps in Southampton town, two in East Hampton, one on Shelter Island, 14 in Brookhaven, three in Babylon, one in Islip, 17 in Huntington and eight in Smithtown. 

“Crew leaders were a foundational part of the migratory labor system in Suffolk County,” writes Mr. Torres. They were “contracted with Long Island growers” and “sanctioned by the state to serve as labor contractors.” 

The crew leaders would make promises to those they recruited, promises not kept. And the migrants commonly ended up in debt to the crew leaders and stuck in the “migrant stream.” Mr. Torres cites Betty Jean Johnson at a Congressional hearing on “allegations of abuse at migrant labor camps throughout New York and New Jersey” testifying in 1961: “They bring us up from the South and make slaves out of us.”

Mr. Torres tells of Reverend Arthur C. Bryant, a leading advocate for farmworkers, pastor of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Greenport and vice chair of the Suffolk County Human Relations Commission, declaring: “False promises and Shanghai methods are still used to induce men into a life of death, hardship and hopelessness.”

Mr. Torres cites others who have helped migrant farmworkers here. Among them: Mary Chase Stone, founder of Long Island Volunteers and Helen Wright Prince, a teacher of children of migrant farmworkers; and journalists who wrote on the situation, Newsday’s Harvey Aronson and Steve Wick. “Members of the press were also targeted for violence,” he says. 

I got my lumps, literally, on the issue. A New York Times article mentioning me is cited in the book. It was at the Cutchogue labor camp in 1971. State Assemblyman Andrew Stein of Manhattan, chair of the Assembly Committee on Malnutrition and Human Needs, was there with journalists. A man involved in the camp’s ownership drove up and, Mr. Torres relates, “attacked Grossman with a piece of wood.” I was working then for the daily Long Island Press.

Mr. Torres says: “Over the years, various state officials, reporters and civil rights advocates who attempted to visit labor camps allegedly received warnings of physical violence and even death threats from camp owners, operators and crew leaders.”

“By the late 1980s, most of the potato farms were gone and so were most of the labor camps,” he writes. Further, there “was a combination of increased mechanization, a shifting farming ideology and a sharp increase in real estate prices.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.