06/26/2019
For more than 40 years, no one knew her name, but they knew about the photo taken of her and her children, a photo that would become a strength and inspiration for mothers everywhere.
The famous photo named "Migrant Mother" taken by Dorothea Lange has been compared to the Mona Lisa achieving "near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in United States history," making the "Migrant Mother" immortal.
Her name is Florence Owens Thompson. Although she has been misidentified for years as being of European descent, Thompson was actually “a full-blooded Cherokee Indian” from Oklahoma.
A new book, “Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother,” written by Sarah Meister, a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art, confirms this information. According to the New York Times, "the book comes out at a time when faces of desperately poor people in migrant caravans dominate the news."
Florence Owens Thompson was born in 1903, in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Although both her parents were Cherokee, her father abandoned her mother before Florence was born. Her mother remarried another man (of Choctaw descent). The family lived on a small farm in Indian Territory outside of Tahlequah.
Thompson married at the age of 17. The family, with three children, would migrate West to California. In 1931, Thompson was pregnant with her sixth child when her first husband died of tuberculosis. She would work in the fields and in restaurants to support her children.
Thompson would remarry two more times. She and her family (now with 10 children) worked as migrant farm workers following the crops in California.
Thompson would say in an interview, "I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids."
She struggled all her life, just trying to make ends meet, trying to be a good mother, raise her children well and hopefully give them a future in which they can have a better life than she had.
In 1936, Thompson and her family were on their way to Watsonville hoping to find lettuce-picking work, when their car broke down. As her sons went into town to pick up some parts for the car, a woman with a camera would approach her. She asked if she could take some photographs of her and her children.
The photographer's name was Dorothea Lange, and one of the pictures she took would become "Migrant Mother."
Thompson hoped the picture might help her or her children. She always wanted a better life. At the very least, she hoped it would share awareness of the working poor.
It did share awareness, but, at that time, it did not help Thompson or her family. After the picture was published, people became aware of the migrant workers who were starving and within days, the migrant camp where Thompson was would received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government, but Thompson and her family had already left the camp.
Thompson never received any payment for the photograph, and she was mostly ashamed of the photos. And, since she was never identified by name, her identity would not be known for 40 years.
In 1978, a reporter found Thompson and her family, and her name and story was finally revealed to the public.
Still ashamed of the photograph, Thompson, later in her life, would remember the photograph again.
She was suffering from cancer and a recent stroke, and she wasn't sure how to pay for all her medical bills. The cost of her care was too much, now the entire family was burdened with uncertainty and the future looked bleak for her children.
She then remembered the picture, the picture she once said was "a curse" because it shamed her.
But, after being hospitalized and wondering how the family could ever pay their medical bills, Thompson and her children made a public appeal. And, the public would remember her - based on Lange's famous photograph.
The family would receive more than 2,000 letters from people who had drawn strength and inspiration from the "Migrant Mother" photo. The family would also receive $35,000 in donations to help pay for her medical bills. Her son would say, "For Mama and us, the photo had always been a bit of curse. After all those letters came in, I think it gave us a sense of pride."
A month later, on September 16, 1983, Thompson would die of "cancer and heart problems" at the age of 80 at Scotts Valley, California. But, she left this Earth, knowing that her family would not be burdened by her financial problems and that she did all she could to be a good mother.
In a 2008 interview with CNN, Thompson's daughter recalled how her mother was a "very strong lady", and "the backbone of our family". She said: "We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something. She didn't eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate. That's one thing she did do."
When Thompson died, she was surrounded by her 10 children, the same children who were there when her photograph was taken, the same children she nurtured, fed, and took care of through the worst of times, becoming a symbol for mothers everywhere.
Her gravestone would read: "FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood."
