Southern Tenant Farmers Union

SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS UNION. In the summer of 1934, a remarkable interracial protest movement arose among the sharecroppers and tenant farmers of eastern Arkansas—the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Battered by the Great Depression and by New Deal crop reduction programs that led to massive evictions from the land, Black and white sharecroppers joined together to try to gain economic security from a collapsing plantation system. Aided by local and national leaders of the Socialist Party, they tried to lobby the federal government to win a share of crop reduction payments and to resist planter efforts to drive them from the land. The union, often led by Black and white fundamentalist ministers, spread quickly throughout the region. In 1935 it organized a cotton choppers’ strike to raise wages for day laborers; it sent members to lobby in Washington, and it maintained interracial solidarity in the face of fierce planter repression. By 1936, the organization claimed more than 25,000 members in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, and had won national recognition for dramatizing the plight of sharecroppers under the New Deal.

However, external and internal pressures prevented the union from consolidating its gains. First of all, planter terror—murders, beatings, arrests—made it impossible for the union to maintain headquarters “in the field.” After 1936, its organizers had to operate from the relative safety of Memphis. Second, Socialist-Communist conflict frayed the union’s solidarity. When the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed a new agricultural affiliate, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), the STFU felt compelled to affiliate; its impoverished membership needed labor support. Unfortunately, the president of UCAPAWA was a Communist ex-professor, Donald Henderson, who regarded the STFU as a Utopian agrarian movement rather than a legitimate trade union. Upon affiliation, Henderson flooded the STFU with paperwork and dues requests, demoralizing its membership and panicking its leadership, who regarded Henderson’s actions as a Communist plot to take over the union. By 1938, the STFU’s Socialist leaders were trying to leave the CIO, or to win a separate affiliation, while Communists in the union were trying to win control of the organization. In 1939, amid a famous protest demonstration by evicted sharecroppers in Missouri, the STFU resolved to leave UCAPAWA. In turn, Henderson sought to persuade rebellious locals to remain in the CIO. By the time the faction fight ended, Henderson had enlisted a few top-flight organizers (Rev. Claude Williams and Rev. Owen Whitfield) but few members, while the STFU had lost two-thirds of its locals. UCAPAWA thereupon left the agricultural field, concentrating on food-processing workers, who were covered by the National Labor Relations Board (and could therefore win federally supervised bargaining elections), while the STFU evolved into a lobbying group for sharecroppers and rural workers. The collapse of the plantation system, and the displacement of its work force, continued apace, unaffected by either organization. But for a brief moment, the STFU had given voice to the poorest of the South’s people, demonstrating that Blacks and whites could be united around common goals even in the heartland of Jim Crow.

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

Honey, Michael K. Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Mitchell, H. L. Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H. L. Mitchell. Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979.

Southern Tenant Farmers Union: The Green Rising,1910-1977. Descriptive Summary. Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University Library. https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05204-002.html

Southern Tenant Farmers Union Museum. Tyronza, Arkansas. Website. https://stfm.astate.edu