McKinney, Edward Britt

McKINNEY, EDWARD BRITT (early 1900s n.d.– 1940s n.d.). African American preacher and Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) organizer, Edward Britt McKinney—called E. B. or Britt by his friends—was a bald, garrulous preacher and a near-legendary organizer for the biracial New Deal–era STFU. McKinney joined the Socialist Party in 1933 and was greatly influenced by Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalism. He was the first Black vice president, and therefore the highest-elected African American official of the STFU from its founding in 1934 to 1938. He organized an STFU local in Marked Tree, Arkansas, on the principle of biracial cooperation, inviting whites to African American meetings. Through his leadership, African American and white STFU locals in Marked Tree grew together instead of apart. In 1934 delegates to the STFU convention elected McKinney as vice president. From 1934 to 1938 he worked feverishly, utilizing his church contacts to enlist members into STFU locals. In 1935 he was among an STFU delegation that traveled to Washington to challenge the Agricultural Adjustment Agency concerning the plight of sharecroppers.

McKinney’s longtime Garveyism grew stronger after 1935, however, as he saw African Americans beaten year after year to placate poor whites who were also given slightly better government service. His devotion to Black separatism inadvertently led him into the middle of a controversy between STFU leader H. L. Mitchell and Donald Henderson, head of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), both of whom were white. In 1937 STFU leaders had voted reluctantly to enter this affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, but Mitchell staunchly resisted UCAPAWA efforts to gain centralized control over STFU operations. In 1938 McKinney attempted to create a separate African American organization within the STFU by gaining separate recognition of thirteen Black locals in Arkansas by the UCAPAWA. As a result, Mitchell charged that McKinney was working with Henderson to split the STFU along racial lines. At a special executive council meeting in September 1938, McKinney was expelled from his post as vice president and from the union itself for these activities. McKinney then joined two other ousted white leaders, Claude Williams and Commonwealth College in Arkansas and W. L. Blackstone of the President’s Council on Farm Tenancy, to oppose Mitchell’s leadership of the STFU. However, Mitchell courted McKinney at the fifth annual STFU convention at Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in late 1938, and McKinney decided to repudiate Williams and Blackstone.

McKinney’s rejection of Black separatism won him readmission to the union, although he did not regain the vice presidency. In 1939 McKinney joined other African American STFU leaders in staying with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the ongoing conflict between Mitchell and the UCAPAWA. This decision virtually ended farm labor organizing efforts in the 1930s. Apparently, no one knows what happened to the dynamic Black leader McKinney, known as a “pillar of Granite in a weary land.”

Canton, Louis. A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecroppers Roadside Demonstration of 1939. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969.

Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the New Deal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

Southern Tenant Farmers Union Papers, 1934-1991. Collection Overview. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/03472/