Mitchell, H.L.

MITCHELL, H. L. (1906–1989). Founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), H. L. Mitchell was one of the foremost twentieth-century American socialists engaged in farm activism and multiracial organizing. Born in Halls, Tennessee, Mitchell worked at farm chores from the age of eight, and after high school graduation tried his hand at a number of jobs, from bootlegging in prohibition days to sharecropping. As an eleven-year-old newspaper boy, he had ridden a special train to Dyersburg, Tennessee, and watched whites lynch a young Black man. Mitchell’s dissatisfaction with organized religion stemmed from his childhood in western Tennessee where his father’s absences as a fundamentalist preacher coupled with the atmosphere of the Tennessee v. Scopes trial. Searching for some way to understand the world around him, Mitchell became what southerners called a “reading fool.” Converted to socialism, he in turn converted his friend, Clay East, and the two created a “Red Square” for Norman Thomas’s 1932 presidential campaign in Tyronza, Arkansas, around Mitchell’s dry-cleaning shop and East’s filling station.

In 1934 the two spearheaded the interracial STFU. With Mitchell’s organizing skills and East packing a pistol as the duly elected township constable, the union thrived. By protesting sharecropper evictions, organizing strikes, and lobbying for federal legislation to improve agricultural conditions in the South—with the support and cooperation of Black and white farm families—southern radicals forcefully fought the system. Along with strikes to raise wages, their most successful effort culminated in the formation of the Delta Cooperative Farm at Rochdale, Mississippi, by tenants evicted from Arkansas plantations for joining the STFU. This project became the model for the Farm Security Administration, created as a result of growing national concern for the plight of the southern tenant farmer.

At its peak, the STFU could claim 30,000 members, a newspaper, the Sharecroppers’ Voice, from Memphis, and a series of public-relations successes in the national press and politics (including “Sharecroppers Week” declared by New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia). Along with the Communists of the Alabama-based Share Croppers Union, Mitchell and the STFU had effected the most important links of rural, radical southern Blacks and whites since Populism, and foreshadowed the future civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

Mitchell’s hopes for a sustained, mass movement of sharecroppers ran into several formidable obstacles. Franklin Roosevelt’s political détente with southern planters forebade any major federal commitment to southern social change, even while Eleanor Roosevelt often expressed her own sympathy for Mitchell’s cause. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), absorbing the STFU in 1938, demanded from tenant farmers an impossible style of organization and commitment of scarce resources. Mitchell’s relations with Communist labor leaders in the CIO rapidly became unsustainable. Most of all, the low prices for commodities and the impending mechanization of southern agriculture fatally undercut sharecroppers’ bargaining power.

Withdrawing from the CIO with his following much weakened, Mitchell opened “Washington’s smallest lobby,” a little corner of agitation for the tenant farmer and agricultural worker. After World War II, he moved the STFU remnant into the American Federation of Labor, and eventually into the meat-cutters’ union. Along the way, Mitchell pioneered the support movement around California farm-workers’ unionization, and organized southern fishermen and sugar cane workers.

By the 1970s–1980s, Mitchell set a new and unique task for himself: the public exploration of the STFU’s history. As no other American Left figure, he single-mindedly set about speaking on campuses and at scholars’ meetings, offering microfilm editions of the STFU papers for sale to libraries, writing his own history, and encouraging media treatment of it. By these efforts and sheer force of personality, Michell made an inestimable contribution not only to radical history but also to the sense of continuity among newer generations.

Dunbar, Anthony P. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1959. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

Honey, Michael K. Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union and the African American Song Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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

Land, Mike. “H.L. Mitchell: A Lifetime of Organizing and Raising Hell,” Southern Changes 9, no. 1 (1987), 3-7. http://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/sc09-1_1204/sc09-1_006/

Mitchell, H. L. Mean Things Happening in This Land. Montclair, N.J.: Allenheld, Osmund, 1979.

Mitchell, H. L. Roll the Union On: A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1987.

The Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union Records, 1034-1991. Finding Aid. University of North Carolina Libraries. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/03472/