In 1935, Kanaga photographed Annie Mae Merriweather for the leftist magazine the New Masses. Merriweather was the widow of Jim Press Merriweather, a sharecropper who was lynched in Lowndes County, Alabama, for his union activities. Merriweather’s harrowing account of her husband’s death, and her own torture at the hands of those who killed him, was published in the November 1935 issue of Labor Defender. Edward Steichen included this image in his 50 Photographs by 50 Photographers exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948, and gave the Museum his personal print of the image which it retains today. Kanaga said of Merriweather, ‘When you look at her face, you can see all the sorrow and trouble in the world. And yet it is so beautiful' (quoted in Davidov, Women’s Camera Work, p. 205).