The 'historical silence' of the Black workers who made Phoenix prosperous [View all]

Before he met adoring fans during his European tours; before he performed with Ray Charles, Muddy Waters and B.B. King; before he was inducted into the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame, Big Pete Pearson, Arizona’s King of Blues, writhed in pain every night before collapsing into an unsettled slumber. Markings from cotton burrs pierced his dark, rugged skin and burns from the blistering sun seemed to be tattooed on his hands.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Pearson spent 12 agonizing hours a day picking cotton on fields along Camelback Road in Phoenix and elsewhere in Arizona, and then packing, lifting and loading hundred-pound sacks of it, a mighty part of the engine that shored up a pillar of the state’s economy.

Peering from under the wide brim of his straw hat back then, Pearson saw people like him — African Americans, hundreds of them — toiling in row after row of cotton plants.

“That was regretful days that you wish you didn’t have to be there,” Pearson, 83, said in a February 2020 interview.

Read more: https://www.azmirror.com/2020/06/19/the-historical-silence-of-the-black-workers-who-made-phoenix-prosperous/