Obligation

Your success is not only yours. It belongs to everyone who sacrificed so you could stand where you stand. Remember them, honor them, and keep climbing higher while staying true to who you are. This framed piece makes a daily reminder of the debt we pay forward.

About This Framed Print

This Obligation framed motivational print features a photograph of African American workers sorting cotton in the post-emancipation South, with a message about honoring the sacrifices of our ancestors. The image is double matted and set in a black frame, finished and ready to display.

The message printed on the poster reads:

We owe it to our ancestors and to the sacrifices they made, to continue to achieve higher goals, while maintaining our identity.

The History Behind the Image

After emancipation, most Black families in the cotton South worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Under the crop-lien system, merchants and landowners advanced seed, tools, and food against the coming harvest, a system that often kept families in debt from one year to the next. Picking, ginning, and sorting cotton was family labor shared by men, women, and children. Supplier materials describe these workers as cotton separators around 1885; we describe the image more generally as late 1800s cotton labor, since the exact source and date are not documented.

About the Founder

D'azi Productions, now Motivational Product Depot, was founded by William Armstead to create motivational art with an emphasis on the African American cultural experience. His posters invite viewers of every background to learn from the past and to apply its lessons to their own goals today.