Florence Owens Thompson

Florence Owens Thompson was born Florence Leona Christie on September 1, 1903, in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Both of her parents claimed Cherokee descent. Her father, Jackson Christie, allegedly abandoned her mother, Mary Jane Cobb, before she was born, and her mother married Charles Akman (of Choctaw descent) in the spring of 1905. The family lived on a small farm in Indian Territory outside Tahlequah. Aged 17, Thompson married Cleo Owens, a farmer's 23-year-old son from Stone County, Missouri, on February 14, 1921. They soon had their first daughter, Violet, followed by a second daughter, Viola, and a son, Leroy (Troy). The family settled in Modesto, California, in 1945. Well after World War II, Thompson met and married hospital administrator George Thompson. This marriage brought her far greater financial security than she had previously enjoyed. ==Migrant Mother==

On March 6, 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Thompson and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there—as many as 2,500 to 3,500. While Jim Hill, her partner, and two of Thompson's sons went into town to get parts to repair the car, Thompson and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As she waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Thompson and her family. She took seven images in the course of ten minutes. Lange's field notes for the Resettlement Administration were typically very thorough, but on this particular day she had been rushing to get home after a month on assignment, and the notes she submitted with this batch of negatives do not refer to any of the seven photographs she took of Thompson and her family. It seems that the published newspaper reports about this camp were later distilled into captions for the series, which explains inaccuracies on the file cards in the Library of Congress. For example, one of the file cards reads: Twenty-three years later, Lange wrote of the encounter with Thompson: Within days, the pea-picker camp received of food from the federal government. Thompson was quoted as saying: "I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did." While the image was being prepared for exhibit in 1938, the negative of the photo was retouched to remove Florence's thumb from the lower-right corner of the image. Circulation In the late 1960s, Bill Hendrie found unretouched prints by Lange of Migrant Mother and 31 other images from the same series in a dumpster at the San Jose Chamber of Commerce. After the death of Hendrie and his wife, their daughter, Marian Tankersley, rediscovered the photos while emptying her parents' San Jose home. The stamp printing was unusual: daughters Katherine McIntosh (on the left in the stamp) and Norma Rydlewski (in Thompson's arms in the stamp) were alive at the time of the printing; usually, the Postal Service does not print stamps of individuals who have not been dead for at least 10 years. In the same month the U.S. stamp was issued, a print of the photograph with Lange's handwritten notes and signature sold in 1998 for $244,500 at Sotheby's New York. In November 2002, Dorothea Lange's personal print of Migrant Mother sold at Christie's New York for $141,500. ==Later life, death, and aftermath==

Thompson's children bought her a house in Modesto, California, in the 1970s, but she preferred living in a mobile home and moved back into one. Thompson was hospitalized and her family appealed for financial help in late August 1983. By September, the family had collected $35,000 in donations to pay for her medical care. Thompson died of "stroke, cancer and heart problems" at Scotts Valley, California, on September 16, 1983, at age 80. She was buried in Lakewood Memorial Park, in Hughson, California, and her gravestone reads: "FLORENCE LEONA THOMPSON Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood." In a 2008 interview with CNN, one of Thompson's daughters, Katherine McIntosh, recalled her mother as 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." A son, Troy Owens, said that more than 2,000 letters received along with donations for his mother's medical fund led to a re-appraisal of the photo: "For Mama and us, the photo had always been a bit of [a] curse. After all those letters came in, I think it gave us a sense of pride." ==Other six photographs==

Lange took seven photos that day, the last being Migrant Mother. The following are the other six photos: File:Additional image from Migrant Mother series, from Oakland Museum Collection 01.jpg|Collection of the Oakland Museum of California File:Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two, 03054.jpg|Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress File:Additional image from Migrant Mother series, from Oakland Museum Collection 02.jpg|Collection of the Oakland Museum of California File:Migrant Mother 1936 2.jpg|Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress File:Migrant Mother, alternative version (LOC fsa.8b29523).jpg|Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress File:Migrant Mother sequence by Dorothea Lange, 8b29525u.jpg|Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress ==References==