THEN

• Southern Mutual Help Association (SMHA) worked on local, regional, state and national levels to fight the huge and powerful plantation system which is entrenched in Louisiana’s economy.
• SMHA strived to help the workers become “empowered persons.” An “empowered person,” explained assistant director Lorna Bourg, is one who knows the plantation system — and knows how to change it. Since SMHA was first organized in 1969, the emphasis was to get the workers involved in helping themselves.
• “We wanted [SMHA] to serve as a catalyst so that the farmworkers would begin to learn how to work together, and not just side-by-side under the direction of a bossman,” explained Sister Anne Catherine Bizalion, SMHA director until her death in 1997.

NOW

• SMHA is partnering with Dr. Phebe A. Hayes, Founder and President of the Iberia African American Historical Society to reproduce and distribute SMHA’s book – “Plantation Portraits – Women in the Louisiana Cane Fields”
• This partnership will help show how women have historically been “not seen and not counted”

CLICK TO OPEN PUBLICATIONS

Read Raising Cane By Carolyn Portier / December 1, 1981

SMHA – An Agent of Change