Cleveland Benjamin's Dead: a struggle for dignity in Louisiana's cane country

The Story

Through a tough-minded mix of journalism and oral history, Patsy Sims chronicles daily life in a community of impoverished workers behind southern Louisiana's 'cane curtain' in the 1970s. The world of the sugar cane plantations, isolated by rows of densely grown stalks, defined the lives of the blacks who lived and labored there, cut off from any prospects of better conditions by the wall of exploitation erected by the white growers.