​​The beginning of the Great Depression in the United States is marked by the sudden collapse of the stock market, known as Black Tuesday, on October 29, 1929. The decade leading up to the financial crisis, the “Roaring Twenties,” however, was a time of unprecedented economic expansion for America. For many parts of the country, the 1920s was a time of “personal extravagance, labor-saving devices, materialism, and unwise investments" (Price Davis 3). The leisure orientation of the twenties is perhaps best illustrated by the rise in automobile ownership, which almost tripled throughout the decade. (In 1928, there was 1 automobile for every 1.4 American households (Kennedy).) The American people experienced financial gain and enjoyed new technologies like motion pictures and automobiles, largely unaware of the impending economic breakdown that had been building up since the first World War. 

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For North Carolina, however, the decade leading up to Black Tuesday was not marked by the same economic upturn that had characterized most of the nation. A growing maldistribution of wealth left North Carolina’s laborers — small farm owners and share-croppers, textile workers, and minors — either grossly underpaid or out of work primarily due to labor-saving inventions of the 1920s (Price Davis). What's more, aggressive logging and poor soil conservation, coupled with severe drought in the late twenties and early thirties, led to widespread soil erosion. When the price of farm goods, primarily cotton and tobacco, fell throughout the 1920s, North Carolinians began to feel the sting of the Depression prior to most other U.S. states.

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Another major contributor to the hard times experienced by the average North Carolinian in the twenties was the oversaturation of the textile market — this became an even bigger problem in the thirties — which can be attributed to the shortened and less-full skirt styles of women’s clothing that required less fabric to produce (Fass). Women's dresses required between ten and twenty yards of fabric in the 1910s, but required a mere two yards in the 1920s. Instead of cutting production to stabilize market prices, North Carolina's competing textile mills increased production, hiring more workers for less pay and enacting severe stretch-outs, which forced extra work hours with little-to-no extra pay (Tindall). By 1928, few mill workers in North Carolina made over ten dollars per week (Tindall). 

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When the thirties arrived and the rest of the nation felt the sudden shock of unemployment and poverty, the majority of North Carolina merely tightened their belts another notch and continued to struggle against the same economic problems that had plagued them throughout the previous decade.

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​The chart below compares the Depression for the United States as a whole to the Depression in North Carolina. The high rate of infant mortality, widespread illiteracy, and appalling percentage of child workers indicate how North Carolina (along with many other southern states — in particular, South Carolina) experienced more deplorable socio-economic conditions than the average U.S. state in the early 20th century.