Child Oyster Shuckers

Oyster shuckers in Bayou La Batre in 1911. A law forbidding children under 14 from working in Alabama was repealed in 1894. Episcopal priest Edgar Gardner Murphy (1869-1913) toiled for child-labor reform, forming the Alabama Child Labor Committee in 1901 to inform the public on the issue, and in 1904 joined in organizing the National Child Labor Committee to campaign across the country during the Progressive era.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress; photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine