This is how cotton is picked

Picking cotton doesn't look that hard until you have to do it several hours in a day, every day of the week, every week of the month in hot humid weather for the rest of your life.

Such a peaceful and satisfying job isn’t it…

So why were people complaining? That looks so easy

Ngl this looks so satisfying.

This is a 5 year old American kid who picked 20 to 25 pounds of cotton a day in Oklahoma, 1916, with no shoes --- decades after slavery was abolished.

I've hiked into a mountain about 3 hours up starting at the trailhead at ~5500 ft. close to home. At one point, you step out of the trees and into a small field of wild cotton. It's pretty cool.

Man uses lighter at cotton factory

Cotton harvesting, 1930s African American field workers pick cotton in a field in Alabam

It's such a time-consuming process. John Rust invented the cotton picker in the 30s. The innovation was good, but people were angry. It put a lot of people out of work