By Matt Simmons, Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel College
Among those most affected by the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression were the landless farmers of the American South, particularly tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta and surrounding region. The post-Civil War rural South was known for having the lowest standard of living in the United States. A two-year study of cotton agriculture in the South conducted by noted sociologists Charles S. Johnson and Edwin R. Embree found that even before the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 during a “period of national prosperity a vast population [in the South] barely earned subsistence.” Conditions were already bad for black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the South; the Great Depression brought these landless farmers and their families, who were already on their knees, to the brink of utter ruin. This essay will briefly discuss how an unlikely movement of black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers coalesced into a unified front that actively undermined racial and gender norms during the worst depression America has ever seen during the height of Jim Crow.
The New Deal plan to save American agriculture was simple. Since productivity was far too high and farm prices were far too low farmers would plant less and make more money. By taking land out of production the law of supply and demand would recalibrate prices, providing farmers with a living wage again. This may have seemed quite reasonable to New Deal planners in far off Washington D.C., but on the ground in the Arkansas Delta and other rural areas across the South it had a disastrous impact. Large plantation owners quickly surmised that if they were being paid to no longer plant their usual acreages this meant they no longer needed their usual number of farmworkers. This meant that tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were already barely making ends meet now were making nothing and were faced with eviction to boot. Rural evictions skyrocketed and those lucky enough to still find paying work in the cotton fields found those wages hardly enough for one person to subsist on, let alone a family.
Out of sheer desperation the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union was formed. In the short term the union “demanded that the eviction from land be stopped” and advocated for “decent wages, hours and conditions for all farm labor” In the long term the goals were much more ambitious: to find a means whereby landless tillers of the soil could become tillers of their own soil based on a cooperative model of land ownership “with the use and occupation of land” as “sole title there-to.” This movement redefined community through shared leadership, shared ritual, shared suffering, and shared vision.
In the 1930s leadership was male and white—everywhere, but particularly in the South. Yet the Executive Council of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union included men and women of different races. This did not happen by chance or accident, nor even necessarily because of enlightened early union leadership. This happened because members demanded it. There was a “women’s revolt” in which the women of the union demanded greater standing in the union. According to the 1936 Convention Proceedings, at the Women’s Conference, “it was decided that the women wished to come member on an equal footing with the men, accepting the same duties and paying dues.” Some women even became important organizers and fundraisers like Henrietta McGhee, a prominent black woman in the union. According to union secretary Evelyn Smith, “there were women who took a lot of leadership in the union too; there weren’t just men…one was Henrietta McGhee…they organized. They used to get up and make speeches. They used to make motions.”
Ritual also helped the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union build and sustain community. Through these rituals men and women of different races symbolically became “brothers” and “sisters.” Executive Secretary H.L. Mitchell described how early members were inducted into the organization by being blindfolded and forced to sit on a seat with a candle underneath it until they got up of their own accord. Through this initiation a new member “learned to get up and go and was no longer shiftless and no-account, as the plantation owners always claimed every sharecropper to be.” New members were also compelled to take an oath which included the promise “to do all in my power to promote the best interests of the Union” and to “go to the aid of my fellow union worker in time of need at the risk of my life.” Given the very real possibility of violence against union members and their families this was no merely symbolic oath. This high degree of fraternal solidarity was further exemplified in Howard Kester & Evelyn Smith’s “Ceremony of the Land” which featured a liturgical call and response designed to bond together members from different races and states. The ceremony ended with each member symbolically sharing the land by taking a handful of dirt from each state with active union membership: Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas.
It is a well-known and timeworn cliche that shared struggle creates strong fraternal bonds. Time and time again this truism was demonstrated by the union. When a black organizer and preacher named C.H. Smith was beaten and jailed following a union meeting near Gilmore, Arkansas, his fellow white union members showed up to his trial at nearby Marion, Arkansas en masse armed with canes and walking sticks. Smith was paroled into the custody of the union attorney C.T. Carpenter. According to H.L. Michell after this incident, “the few holdouts among the black sharecroppers joined the union. Black and white unity had carried the day.” An infamous incident involving Willie Sue Blagden also demonstrates this power of shared suffering. Blagden, a young white women and union supporter from a middle-class Memphis family, made headlines after being whipped while searching for more information on a missing (and presumed dead) black union member, Frank Weems. Newspapers from across the country from The Commercial Appeal in Memphis to the New York Times focused on the lurid details of the incident, particularly given the presumed exalted position of white women in southern society. Far more radical was the notion that a white, middle class southern woman would concern herself with investigating the fate of a poor black sharecropper from the cotton fields.
Ultimately a common vision of the future allowed this interracial community of landless farmers to come together in what sharecropper Viola Smith referred to as the “hardest place in the states.” In this future everyone had an opportunity to own a farm of their very own. Land titles were secure and wouldn’t be lost through foreclosure just because of a bad growing season or fluctuations in the market. In the end it was never really about a farm or land—what these landless tillers of the soil simply wanted, as sharecropper Mary Lee Moore put it, was “some place to call home.” Home was the common goal which united both black and white farmers in a time of heightened racial conflict in an era of lynchings and massacres. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and its vision of democratic farm ownership based on cooperation rather than competition created a figurative home where landless farmers could transcend racial difference and create community in the cotton fields.
Sources Referenced
i Alex Lichtenstein in Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers (1936; repr., Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 27.
ii Charles S. Johnson, Edwin R. Embree, W.W. Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy: Summary of Filed Studies & Statistical Surveys 1933-1935 (1935 repr., Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 11.
iii United States Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Service. A Short History of Agricultural Adjustment, 1933-1975 by Wayne D. Rasmussen, Gladys, L. Baker, and James S. Ward. Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 391, Washington, D.C., 1976.
iv As sociologist Olive M. Stone noted in a speech in Washington D.C. in 1934: “Two years of experimentation with a federal-controlled agriculture have brought, according to many students of the situation…relief to landlords and farm creditors, high prices to speculators, and little but eviction and lowered standards of living to croppers and tenants.” “The Plight of the Southern Sharecropper,” Olive M. Stone, December 8, 1934, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
v “Notice to Vacate” to Mr. Cunningham, December 20, 1934, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; H.L. Mitchell to Howard Cashman, Feb 25, 1936, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mitchell estimated total evictions at anywhere from 200,000 – 500,000 families.
vi “Program of STFU,” undated, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
vii “Convention Proceedings,” Official Report of Second Annual Convention, Jan. 3rd, 4th, 5th, 1936, Labor Temple, Little Rock, published by the National Office, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
viii “Convention Proceedings,” Official Report of Second Annual Convention Jan. 3, 4, 5, 1936, Labor Temple, Little Rock, Published by the National Office, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Executive Council Members included Mrs. Walter Moskop (white), Mrs. Marie Pierce (black), W. Harris, J.E. Cameroon, J.A. Allen (black), W.M. Stephens, Howard Kester (white), H.L. Mitchell (white), J.R. Butler (white), E.B. McKinney (black), and Otis Sweeden (identified as Cherokee by H.L. Mitchell).
ix H.L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Cofounder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (1979; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 113-114.
x Convention Proceedings,” Official Report of Second Annual Convention Jan. 3, 4, 5, 1936.
xi Evelyn Smith Munro, interview by Mary Frederickson, Laguna Beach, CA, April 17, 1976, transcript, Southern Historical Collection, Southern Oral History Program Collection, #4007, Louis Round Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
xii H.L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land, 93.
xiii “Convention Proceedings,” Official Report of Second Annual Convention. Jan. 3, 4, 5, 1936. Outlandish oaths were certainly common enough among fraternities and secret societies such as the Masons, but within the context of the very real daily dangers faced by union members such an oath must have been carefully considered.
xiv “Ceremony of the Land, Folder 214, Howard Kester Papers #3834, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
xv H.L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land, 54.
xvi “Statement of Ms. Willie Sue Blagden made to honorable Same E. Whitaker, special assistant to the attorney general, at Memphis, Tennessee, on June 19, 1936,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers, OF File 407B, Folder Arkansas Tenant Farmers Strike, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. “Woman Flogged in Cotton Strike,” “New York Times, June 17, 1936, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Accessed February 15, 2019; Women and Minister Beaten, She Charges, The Commercial Appeal, June 17, 1936, Newspapers.com, Accessed January 23, 2023; “Lashed,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 18, 1936, Newspapers.com, Accessed January 23, 2023.
xvii Viola Smith to H.L. Mitchell, June 13, 1936, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records, Reel 2, originals located in Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
xviii Mary Lee Moore to H.L. Mitchell, March 10, 1936, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records, Reel 1, originals located in Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
xix Lynching In America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd edition (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017); “You might have heard of the Elaine riot—I am told by my father, that tried to organize to make things better, and this happened in many places where they tried some kind of an organization.” See George Stith, interview by Scott Ellsworth, Memphis, TN, April 16, 1982, transcript, Southern Historical Collection, #3472, Box 83, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC.
xx “Convention Proceedings,” Official Report of Second Annual Convention, Jan. 3rd, 4th, 5th, 1936, Labor Temple, Little Rock, published by the National Office, Reel 1, Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Records #3472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel College where he teaches courses in U.S. History and public history. Prior to joining Emmanuel College, he worked in the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of South Florida. Dr. Simmons received his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Florida. He holds an M.A. in U.S. history from the University of Tulsa and a B.A. in political science from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South.
