 David Dean Rusk was born in a rural district of Cherokee County, Georgia, to Robert Hugh Rusk and Frances Elizabeth (née Clotfelter) Rusk.Rusk's father worked as a sharecropper, an exploitative form of agriculture common in the South, and Rusk inherited a strong work ethic from his Presbyterian parents.Owing to the extreme poverty in rural Georgia at the time, Rusk had to walk to school barefoot as shoes were too expensive for his parents to buy.