On the day after Thanksgiving in 1960, Americans met a mother who couldn’t afford milk for her nine children. They met a family of six who were sleeping in the woods, $1.45 to their name, traveling miles looking for work.

They met men, women, and children who were trucked across the southeastern United States in open, unregulated truckbeds—conditions often worse than those afforded to cattle. These people, Edward R. Murrow told the audience of his CBS documentary Harvest of Shame, were “the people who harvest the food for the best-fed nation in the world.”

“We used to own our slaves,” Murrow says, quoting a farmer. “Now we just rent them.”

Never before had the conditions of farmworkers been so deeply and widely reported.