In many of the places where Hickok stopped to talk to employers, and to those who had managed to escape the worst effects of the Depression, she noted appalling racism. A Baptist pastor told her that he ‘understood Negroes and loved them – as one loves horses and dogs’. ‘Negroes’, she was told, were ‘going to get it in the neck’, because as jobs vanished, ‘the tendency is to throw out Negroes and hire whites, and this was only right since they are uniformly lazy and shiftless’.
