Hillhouse (aka Rochdale) Farm
Significant portions of the following are taken from
Dunbar, Anthony P. (1981). Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia,
particularly Chapter 5, “Gaining Ground.”
Photos are from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.
Dunbar, Anthony P. (1981). Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia,
particularly Chapter 5, “Gaining Ground.”
Photos are from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.
Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas. The families of evicted sharecroppers of the Dibble Plantation. (1936 Jan) Vachon
A few miles west of Clarksdale, just south of Rena Lara, is the community of Hillhouse (or Hill House) and Rochdale. Few remember now but on those fertile acres of Delta farmland an experimental cooperative farm was established in 1936. It was initiated by a union - the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union - and was as deep into socialism as could be. It was also a godsend for dozens of farm families who had been kicked off plantations in Arkansas.
The new year of 1936 began tragically in Arkansas when an Earle planter named C. H. Dibble set off a new wave of evictions by ousting twenty-one of his tenant families. Before long 105 people, 28 of them children less than fifteen years of age, were stranded on the roadside begging food, clothing, and shelter. The union carried many of these families to a Negro Baptist church situated near Earle on U.S. Highway 64 where some were housed in the building and the overflow slept beneath crude shelters made of quilts in the churchyard. A union meeting was held that night at a Methodist church nearby, but it was broken up by deputies who shot two sharecroppers, Virgil Ligons and Ed Franklin, and arrested a third, Jim Ball. They put Ball, the father of five now-homeless children, on trial and upon the shakiest of evidence saw him convicted of assault with intent to kill. He was sent to prison for more than a year.
The new year of 1936 began tragically in Arkansas when an Earle planter named C. H. Dibble set off a new wave of evictions by ousting twenty-one of his tenant families. Before long 105 people, 28 of them children less than fifteen years of age, were stranded on the roadside begging food, clothing, and shelter. The union carried many of these families to a Negro Baptist church situated near Earle on U.S. Highway 64 where some were housed in the building and the overflow slept beneath crude shelters made of quilts in the churchyard. A union meeting was held that night at a Methodist church nearby, but it was broken up by deputies who shot two sharecroppers, Virgil Ligons and Ed Franklin, and arrested a third, Jim Ball. They put Ball, the father of five now-homeless children, on trial and upon the shakiest of evidence saw him convicted of assault with intent to kill. He was sent to prison for more than a year.
Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas. The families of evicted sharecroppers of the Dibble plantation. They were legally evicted the week of January 12, 1936. The plantation having charged that by membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union they were engaging in a conspiracy to retain their homes. This contention granted by the court, the eviction, though at the point of a gun, was quite legal. The pictures were taken just after the evictions before they were moved into the tent colony they later enjoyed. (1936 Jan) Vachon
Families of evicted sharecroppers on the Dibble plantation. Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas (1936 Jan) Vachon
A meeting called to protest the shootings was held the next afternoon in a Baptist church near Parkin. Howard Kester (* see footnote) was the main speaker. He drove from Memphis with Evelyn Smith and Herman I. Goldberger, the attorney who was unsuccessfully fighting the evictions, and they found more than 450 white and black sharecroppers at the church. Kester had barely reached the pulpit when a squad of men armed with ax handles and guns broke into the building and began clubbing the people in the pews. They waded through the church, striking and cursing anybody they could reach. Some of the sharecroppers escaped through the church windows, taking glass and sash with them, but Kester continued with his speech. What kept him in the pulpit, he said, was the example of a group of black women seated directly in front of him who refused to acknowledge the mayhem to their rear. Soon, however, there was no one left but these few and the mob, whose leader strode up to Kester demanding, "Are you coming peaceably or will we have to take you?" Kester replied, "I am breaking no law, and if you want me you will have to take me." Whereupon they did, forcing the feisty preacher from the pulpit and out of the church. They sat him behind the wheel of his own '32 Chevrolet, put two gunmen on the running boards, and ordered him to follow their lead car out of town.
The families of evicted sharecroppers of the Dibble plantation. Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas (1936 Jan) Vachon
Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas. The families of evicted sharecroppers of the Dibble plantation. They were legally evicted the week of January 12, 1936 (1936 Jan) Vachon
Furniture of evicted sharecroppers on the Dibble plantation. Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas (1936 Jan) Vachon
Parkin (vicinity), Arkansas. The families of evicted sharecroppers from the Dibble plantation. Were legally evicted the week of January 12, 1936. The plantation having charged that by membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union they were engaging in a conspiracy to retain their homes, this contention being granted by the court. The evictions, though at the point of a gun, were quite legal (1936 Jan) Vachon
Kester was taken through the darkened streets of Earle. Once he had to slow abruptly to avoid hitting a small dog. The gunman beside him snarled, "You care more about dogs than you do about white people," but Kester reflected that he would have given pretext for an even angrier outburst had he hit the dog. Past Earle, they took a dirt road into the woods and halted. The captive was pulled from his car and a hangman's noose dangled before his eyes.
Kester summoned all his persuasive powers and began speaking loudly to one of the leaders of the gang, a man he recognized as an Earle cotton broker. He had harmed no one, Kester pointed out, and since he was not from Arkansas his murder would be investigated by federal authorities. The abductors could be identified by scores of people back at the church and were sure to be convicted. The kidnappers drew aside for a private discussion, but Kester overheard the words, "This man is telling the truth. We could get in a peck of trouble." The broker put an end to the talk by saying he had decided to escort Kester to the Mississippi River Bridge into Tennessee, but that if he ever returned to Arkansas, "We'll shoot you on sight." Kester drove the twenty-five miles back to the river, and across it, in a cold sweat.
Meanwhile, union members had carried the word to Memphis that Kester had been captured and likely lynched. Harry L. Mitchell (STFU co-founder and executive secretary) called the Associated Press bureau chief, who relayed the news to New York City. It was soon told to Norman Thomas, who was addressing a meeting at the Hotel Roosevelt. Thomas sadly announced the fate of his friend, and shortly several listeners were sending telegrams of condolence to Alice in Nashville. It was not until several hours later, after her husband had collected his wits and found a telephone, that Alice learned he was still alive. Howard drove to Nashville that night, reaching home around 4 o'clock in the morning. He and his wife spent the remaining hours of darkness huddled together in front of the fireplace, Alice weeping.
The indifference of the government to the eviction drama was recorded by William Amberson, who wrote late in January:
I fear that events in Crittenden are moving to a very bitter climax. Kelly Williams told me last night that the men at Earle had agreed to bring weapons to their next meeting, called for Friday night, and to defend themselves if again attacked by the planters. . . . Unless some agency of government steps in at once there is likely to be a most grievous situation. . . . The bitterness is being fanned by many evictions. One white woman and eight children were forced to live in the railroad depot at Earle for some days. She appealed to . . . the mayor and he spurned her. The Williams collected three dollars to send a wire to Futrell. Thereupon [the mayor] agreed to give her shelter and food. This was the only case which we could find in which any relief had been given, other than Union relief. There was absolutely no case of WPA action anywhere. Washington must move to do something about all this. . . . The men will delay further meetings if they think there is the slightest chance that some other way can be found. But . . . another whitewash of this stinking mess will be the last straw to break the patience of these people.
I must say that I have never been so nauseated by this situation as this trip. The utter brutality and callousness with which the planters are throwing off families is beyond belief. We visited among others the Hightower family, a widow and seven children, negro. She made ten bales of cotton, but has been ordered evicted without a cent of settlement, and her two mules and all her tools have been taken from her. They were to be moved today into a miserable wreck of a house, absolutely falling to pieces. We gave Marie Pierce $3.00 from the relief funds to feed these people. The Avery group of families also need relief, but the money, is more than gone ... the Parkin local promised to take a collection but the last meeting was called off because they feared an attack.
Kester's narrow escape from the hangman's rope got the union some press attention, however; and Gardner Jackson arranged a dinner at Washington's exclusive Cosmos Club for several senators and congressmen who wished to learn more about civil liberties violations growing out of the union movement in Arkansas. Jackson, one of those purged from the Agriculture Department, now chaired the National Committee on Rural Social Planning and bore credentials making him the STFU's official spokesman in Washington. The dinner was held on February 21, 1936, and Kester was the featured speaker.
Jackson had persuaded Senators Edward P. Costigan of Colorado, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin, Lewis B. Schwellenbach of Washington, and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Representatives Carolina O'Day of New York, Maury Maverick of Texas, and George P. Schneider of Wisconsin to sponsor the meeting. In all, about fifty politicians and church and labor leaders, including John L. Lewis,showed up. Kester spoke about the atrocities visited upon farm workers in Arkansas and read letters from Amberson testifying that conditions were becoming steadily worse. The only hopeful sign was the presence in Arkansas of Dorothy Day, who had founded, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker movement, and Sam Franklin, assistant to the international Christian crusader Sherwood Eddy, who were searching for a tract of land which might sustain the evicted tenants. They had located a tract in Poinsett County but needed $15,000 from the Resettlement Administration to buy it. The money was nowhere in sight.
A second report on the "Southern situation" was given by Clyde Johnson and Al Jackson from the Alabama Share Croppers Union. Jackson's head was wrapped in bandages, protecting, he said, wounds he had received in beatings by Alabama plantation owners. John L. Lewis fresh from a CIO meeting which had rejected an AFL ultimatum to disband, followed this testimony with a demand that some federal protection be given to workers trying to organize unions. He expressed doubt, however, that Congress would do anything until blood flowed in the streets.
Senator La Follette concluded the meeting by promising definite action. True to his word he introduced, on March 23, a resolution in the Senate to create a subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor which would concern itself with violations of the rights of free speech and assembly and with interference with labor's right to organize. The La Follette Committee, as it became known, was created on June 6; besides the Wisconsin senator its members were Elbert D. Thomas of Utah and Louis Murphy of Iowa. It began hearings just as the CIO launched an organizing campaign in the steel industry, and it rendered great service to the labor movement by exposing the violence that big companies aimed at unions and the armies of gangsters, or detectives, that corporations marshaled to fight the union movement in the steel, coal, automobile, rubber, and electrical industries. But the La Follette Committee never tackled agriculture, the industry where civil liberties abuses were so massive and obvious that the testimony of Kester, Johnson, and Jackson had been used as the springboard for the entire Senate investigating effort. Agriculture was always the "next" topic on the agenda – the one never reached because of the power in the Senate of southern Democrats. The day after the dinner at the Cosmos Club a parcel of dynamite was thrown into the sharecropper tent colony in Parkin. By some miracle it did not go off.
Even with the silence of the La Follette Committee it could not he said that the unpleasant news from Arkansas did not reach the president's ear. At a cabinet meeting on March 6, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins suggested that a federal mediator he sent to the Delta. Vice-President Garner overruled the idea, fearing to cause embarrassment to Senator Robinson of Arkansas. Instead, Roosevelt had Rexford Tugwell contact Robinson and ask him to work through private channels to stop the bloodshed. The president also sent a telegram to Norman Thomas on March 13 saying that he had asked Governor Futrell to name an investigating committee. Thomas replied that Futrell had had ample opportunity to intervene in the crisis but had not done so. Mitchell sent a similar telegram to Roosevelt, but he did not enjoy the same direct access to the president that Thomas did. His telegram was answered by R. F. Croons of the AAA Compliance Division who said that conditions in Arkansas in regard to the cotton program had been investigated and found to be in good order. Mitchell sent a blistering response to this and received in return Croom's final words on the subject: "our own very extensive researches indicate that the program has . . . been administered . . . with helpful results to all people everywhere."
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union could not bear the burden of paying out roughly $100 weekly to the displaced families in the tent colonies. Late in February, Amberson wrote to Kester, who was trying to raise funds in Boston, that the last of their provisions had been handed out. "The money is gone, Amberson wrote, "it is either the WPA or starvation for these people from now on."
Kester summoned all his persuasive powers and began speaking loudly to one of the leaders of the gang, a man he recognized as an Earle cotton broker. He had harmed no one, Kester pointed out, and since he was not from Arkansas his murder would be investigated by federal authorities. The abductors could be identified by scores of people back at the church and were sure to be convicted. The kidnappers drew aside for a private discussion, but Kester overheard the words, "This man is telling the truth. We could get in a peck of trouble." The broker put an end to the talk by saying he had decided to escort Kester to the Mississippi River Bridge into Tennessee, but that if he ever returned to Arkansas, "We'll shoot you on sight." Kester drove the twenty-five miles back to the river, and across it, in a cold sweat.
Meanwhile, union members had carried the word to Memphis that Kester had been captured and likely lynched. Harry L. Mitchell (STFU co-founder and executive secretary) called the Associated Press bureau chief, who relayed the news to New York City. It was soon told to Norman Thomas, who was addressing a meeting at the Hotel Roosevelt. Thomas sadly announced the fate of his friend, and shortly several listeners were sending telegrams of condolence to Alice in Nashville. It was not until several hours later, after her husband had collected his wits and found a telephone, that Alice learned he was still alive. Howard drove to Nashville that night, reaching home around 4 o'clock in the morning. He and his wife spent the remaining hours of darkness huddled together in front of the fireplace, Alice weeping.
The indifference of the government to the eviction drama was recorded by William Amberson, who wrote late in January:
I fear that events in Crittenden are moving to a very bitter climax. Kelly Williams told me last night that the men at Earle had agreed to bring weapons to their next meeting, called for Friday night, and to defend themselves if again attacked by the planters. . . . Unless some agency of government steps in at once there is likely to be a most grievous situation. . . . The bitterness is being fanned by many evictions. One white woman and eight children were forced to live in the railroad depot at Earle for some days. She appealed to . . . the mayor and he spurned her. The Williams collected three dollars to send a wire to Futrell. Thereupon [the mayor] agreed to give her shelter and food. This was the only case which we could find in which any relief had been given, other than Union relief. There was absolutely no case of WPA action anywhere. Washington must move to do something about all this. . . . The men will delay further meetings if they think there is the slightest chance that some other way can be found. But . . . another whitewash of this stinking mess will be the last straw to break the patience of these people.
I must say that I have never been so nauseated by this situation as this trip. The utter brutality and callousness with which the planters are throwing off families is beyond belief. We visited among others the Hightower family, a widow and seven children, negro. She made ten bales of cotton, but has been ordered evicted without a cent of settlement, and her two mules and all her tools have been taken from her. They were to be moved today into a miserable wreck of a house, absolutely falling to pieces. We gave Marie Pierce $3.00 from the relief funds to feed these people. The Avery group of families also need relief, but the money, is more than gone ... the Parkin local promised to take a collection but the last meeting was called off because they feared an attack.
Kester's narrow escape from the hangman's rope got the union some press attention, however; and Gardner Jackson arranged a dinner at Washington's exclusive Cosmos Club for several senators and congressmen who wished to learn more about civil liberties violations growing out of the union movement in Arkansas. Jackson, one of those purged from the Agriculture Department, now chaired the National Committee on Rural Social Planning and bore credentials making him the STFU's official spokesman in Washington. The dinner was held on February 21, 1936, and Kester was the featured speaker.
Jackson had persuaded Senators Edward P. Costigan of Colorado, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., of Wisconsin, Lewis B. Schwellenbach of Washington, and Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Representatives Carolina O'Day of New York, Maury Maverick of Texas, and George P. Schneider of Wisconsin to sponsor the meeting. In all, about fifty politicians and church and labor leaders, including John L. Lewis,showed up. Kester spoke about the atrocities visited upon farm workers in Arkansas and read letters from Amberson testifying that conditions were becoming steadily worse. The only hopeful sign was the presence in Arkansas of Dorothy Day, who had founded, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker movement, and Sam Franklin, assistant to the international Christian crusader Sherwood Eddy, who were searching for a tract of land which might sustain the evicted tenants. They had located a tract in Poinsett County but needed $15,000 from the Resettlement Administration to buy it. The money was nowhere in sight.
A second report on the "Southern situation" was given by Clyde Johnson and Al Jackson from the Alabama Share Croppers Union. Jackson's head was wrapped in bandages, protecting, he said, wounds he had received in beatings by Alabama plantation owners. John L. Lewis fresh from a CIO meeting which had rejected an AFL ultimatum to disband, followed this testimony with a demand that some federal protection be given to workers trying to organize unions. He expressed doubt, however, that Congress would do anything until blood flowed in the streets.
Senator La Follette concluded the meeting by promising definite action. True to his word he introduced, on March 23, a resolution in the Senate to create a subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor which would concern itself with violations of the rights of free speech and assembly and with interference with labor's right to organize. The La Follette Committee, as it became known, was created on June 6; besides the Wisconsin senator its members were Elbert D. Thomas of Utah and Louis Murphy of Iowa. It began hearings just as the CIO launched an organizing campaign in the steel industry, and it rendered great service to the labor movement by exposing the violence that big companies aimed at unions and the armies of gangsters, or detectives, that corporations marshaled to fight the union movement in the steel, coal, automobile, rubber, and electrical industries. But the La Follette Committee never tackled agriculture, the industry where civil liberties abuses were so massive and obvious that the testimony of Kester, Johnson, and Jackson had been used as the springboard for the entire Senate investigating effort. Agriculture was always the "next" topic on the agenda – the one never reached because of the power in the Senate of southern Democrats. The day after the dinner at the Cosmos Club a parcel of dynamite was thrown into the sharecropper tent colony in Parkin. By some miracle it did not go off.
Even with the silence of the La Follette Committee it could not he said that the unpleasant news from Arkansas did not reach the president's ear. At a cabinet meeting on March 6, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins suggested that a federal mediator he sent to the Delta. Vice-President Garner overruled the idea, fearing to cause embarrassment to Senator Robinson of Arkansas. Instead, Roosevelt had Rexford Tugwell contact Robinson and ask him to work through private channels to stop the bloodshed. The president also sent a telegram to Norman Thomas on March 13 saying that he had asked Governor Futrell to name an investigating committee. Thomas replied that Futrell had had ample opportunity to intervene in the crisis but had not done so. Mitchell sent a similar telegram to Roosevelt, but he did not enjoy the same direct access to the president that Thomas did. His telegram was answered by R. F. Croons of the AAA Compliance Division who said that conditions in Arkansas in regard to the cotton program had been investigated and found to be in good order. Mitchell sent a blistering response to this and received in return Croom's final words on the subject: "our own very extensive researches indicate that the program has . . . been administered . . . with helpful results to all people everywhere."
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union could not bear the burden of paying out roughly $100 weekly to the displaced families in the tent colonies. Late in February, Amberson wrote to Kester, who was trying to raise funds in Boston, that the last of their provisions had been handed out. "The money is gone, Amberson wrote, "it is either the WPA or starvation for these people from now on."
President of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Four semi-permanent tent camps remained by the highway as the chill winds of early March gusted across the barren cotton fields. They were in plain sight of the motorists who passed by Earle or Parkin, but the sight of hoboes by the roadside was too common in 1936 to enable these castaways to make much of an impression on the agencies that might have helped. The sharecroppers were huddled beneath the most makeshift of shelters to escape the rain and frost. Strewn about their camps were all of the household goods and farming implements that they had carried with them in their hurried exodus from the plantations. How they found the little food they shared was a mystery to all. H. L. Mitchell remarked bitterly that "I wish we had enough money to send them all to Washington and let them camp on Aubrey Williams' and Rex Tugwell's front door steps, and maybe they couldn't get around feeding them."
H.L. Mitchell, Secretary of Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Union headquarters, Memphis, Tennessee (1938 Jun) Lange
Suddenly a partial, but most welcome, solution presented itself. The evangelist Sherwood Eddy and his assistant, Sam Franklin, located a plantation in Mississippi which could be used as a resettlement farm for the squatters, and Eddy decided to invest the initial cash needed to buy the place. He met with the STFU's officers to describe the venture. Afterwards Kester wrote, "I felt as though the Kingdom was really being born and that something of historical importance was about to make its appearance on earth." It would be a cooperative farm and would demonstrate, Kester said, that the rural life of America may he lifted to a new high through our community ideal. . . . Don't think me either drunk or delirious. I was never more sane. This thing is of breath-taking importance and someday must be reckoned as one of the really important adventures in faith on the part of a disinherited group."
Eddy had purchased a farm in Mississippi rather than Arkansas for reasons of safety, but Mitchell, with greater foresight, observed that "Eddy refused to invest money in Arkansas saying that he would not set a co-operative in the midst of a volcano. Knowing the Delta as I do I greatly fear that they are jumping from the frying pan into the fire."
Eddy had purchased a farm in Mississippi rather than Arkansas for reasons of safety, but Mitchell, with greater foresight, observed that "Eddy refused to invest money in Arkansas saying that he would not set a co-operative in the midst of a volcano. Knowing the Delta as I do I greatly fear that they are jumping from the frying pan into the fire."
The cooperative was soon christened Rochdale Farm in honor of the textile manufacturing town in England that had been the center of the British cooperative movement a century before. It consisted of 2,000 acres in Bolivar County, 800 of which were ready for cultivation. There were large stands of timber and eleven tenant houses and barns. Eddy bought the plantation with $1,000 in cash and a mortgage for $16,500, but it was eventually deeded to a board of trustees, the most active of whom were Reinhold Niebuhr, William Amberson and John Rust. Rust and his brother Mack had perfected an invention that would dramatically change southern culture, the cotton-picking machine. The brothers, both Socialists, were unusual inventors in that they worried about the effect on the workers that their contrivance would have. They were quite slow to market the picker, but in anticipation of future profits they directed that most of the proceeds go into a foundation intended to support Rochdale Farm and other alternatives to plantation society. They knew that the economic system which sustained several million people was dying with nothing to catch the inevitable victims. Oddly, the Rust cotton picker was first produced by the government of the USSR and only later did it enter the United States as the basis for the Allis-Chalmers machine. In neither case did it reward the Rust family with great wealth.
The first "social administrator" of Rochdale was Sam Franklin. Born on 1902 in Dandridge, Tennessee, Franklin had attended nearby Maryville College, McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, and the University, of Edinburgh. He married Dorothy Winters of Maryville, and they had gone as Presbyterian missionaries to Japan in 1929 to direct the Fellowship House in Kyoto. They lived there in a cooperative household with Japanese and Formosans and worked among factory workers until the rise of Japan's war-hungry right wing forced their departure in 1934. Like his employer Eddy, Franklin was a relentless social visionary, and he considered himself a socialist during the Depression years. Upon hearing of Franklin's appointment to Rochdale, another southern religious activist wrote happily to Kester, "You don't need to be told that Sam Franklin is all wool and a yard wide."
Sam Franklin, graduate of Union Theological Seminary and director of the Hill House cooperative experiment at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Soon after Rochdale was created, A. Eugene Cox was hired to be its accountant. The son of a Texas sharecropper, Cox had quit school in the seventh grade, been a bookkeeper for Standard Oil, administered migrant relief, and pursued, for a time, a ministerial career. After five years as a student at Texas Christian University, he met Eddy at a revival and became interested in the Rochdale project. He joined the farm staff in June 1936 and devoted the next twenty years of his life to this unique experiment in cooperative community.
Kester was also considered a staff member. He resigned from the Presbyterian church in the summer of 1936 because it was evident that it would not ordain him, and in October he was officially accepted into the Congregational church ministry. There were signs that other Congregational pastors would resist Kester's ordination, but Fred Ensminger, a church leader in Tennessee, saw that the ceremony was conducted without incident. Kester's formal assignment within the church was to serve as the chaplain of Rochdale, but it was mainly an honorary position since he never lived in Mississippi.
The first seven families arrived at Rochdale in March. All had been evicted from the Dibble plantation, and all were white, though soon the black families began to arrive. While this group was in transit, another eight families were evicted from the M. E. Holland plantation near Wynne, Arkansas.
Kester was also considered a staff member. He resigned from the Presbyterian church in the summer of 1936 because it was evident that it would not ordain him, and in October he was officially accepted into the Congregational church ministry. There were signs that other Congregational pastors would resist Kester's ordination, but Fred Ensminger, a church leader in Tennessee, saw that the ceremony was conducted without incident. Kester's formal assignment within the church was to serve as the chaplain of Rochdale, but it was mainly an honorary position since he never lived in Mississippi.
The first seven families arrived at Rochdale in March. All had been evicted from the Dibble plantation, and all were white, though soon the black families began to arrive. While this group was in transit, another eight families were evicted from the M. E. Holland plantation near Wynne, Arkansas.
J.M. Rees tells his story of violence in Arkansas. Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Ex-sharecroppers from Arkansas established on Sherwood Eddy's cooperative experiment at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
"We have no relief money, and are at a loss as to what to do," wrote Mitchell. "I greatly fear that the co-operative may drain away from the Union resources which might be available for relief." And to Kester: "You fellows must realize that just by taking 25 or more families off to Mississippi doesn't solve the Relief problem . . . those people in these tent colonies look to me for everything and believe me it is a one man job to tell them there is nothing for them. . . . If we can build the Union we will take over all the damn plantations and won't bother to pay for them again, as Dr. Eddy et al are doing with this one." Yet Mitchell defended the costly cooperative experiment to Clyde Johnson. "It is paternalistic and all of that," he wrote, "but what about your Soviet Collectives, weren't they too the same. The State took the place of the Philanthropist." He told the Alabama organizer that the sharecroppers had already paid for the land a "thousand times over" and would not buy it again, but if the Rochdale Farm was successful it would prove that the American farmer did not "have to be forced into collectivism."
Children at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
An ultra-high resolution version of the above photo is available. Click here.
Sharecroppers' families gathering needs for their 4th of July celebration, whites and blacks together. Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
An evicted Arkansas sharecropper now settled at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July-Sep) Lange
At Hill House, Mississippi. He wears the union button (1936 July) Lange
One of the evicted sharecroppers from Arkansas now settled at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
The beginning of an educational program at the newly-started Hill House cooperative experiment. Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Children of evicted sharecropper, now living on Sherwood Eddy cooperative plantation (1936 July) Lange
Negro boy. Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Negro child. Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) lange
Negro girl. Hill House, Mississippi (1936 June) Lange
Evicted Arkansas sharecropper. One of the more active of the union members (Southern Tenant Farmers Union). Now building his new home at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
White and blacks solve problems together on the Sherwood Eddy cotton cooperative of Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
New cabins at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Family of one of the evicted sharecroppers from Arkansas who has been resettled at Hill House, Mississippi (1936 July) Lange
Despite the evictions, the STFU membership voted overwhelmingly in the spring of 1936 to go on strike for a ten-hour day. The inflated voting tally (6,118 to 384 was the official ballot count) hid the disrupted condition of the union. Many locals did not bother to vote because their organization had been shattered by nightly terrorist raids. In one of these, near Earle, a group of masked men murdered Willie Hurst, the eyewitness to the scuffle between Jim Ball and the deputies that had resulted in Ball's prison sentence. Pressure from Washington forced Governor Futrell to make a cursory investigation of this vigilante war, but he told the press:
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I am reminded of the play, "Much Ado About Nothing". With slight modification, this fits the situation in Eastern Arkansas with reference to the Tenant Farmers' Union. It is much ado about a very little. . . . Some of these negro tenant farmers wanted to join a union. They had the legal right to do so. The land owners conceded this, but they are afraid. They know that the negro is easily excited into the most unbridled violence. . . . "They remember vividly the Elaine affair, where the negroes, under the guidance of white men, had planned to dispatch several owners of land in that country. . . . You cannot get this fear out of the land owners. They don't want trouble. They don't want agitators around... . A good negro, in the eyes of a white man, is one who attends to his business, works his crop, stays sober and keeps out of mischief. . . . There is no way to make a man keep a negro on his place if he does not want to keep him there. Most of these landlords will not keep a tenant who is a member of the Union, and, knowing the situation as I do, they are correct in this position."
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As the strike date approached, an unwelcome announcement came from John Brophy, director of the CIO. Since the CIO was directing its energies toward workers in mass industries, Brophy wrote, "it is inadvisable for the C.I.O. to deal now with the subject of the building up of a union of workers on the cotton plantations of the South. This is really out of our field." The STFU would go into its 1936 strike without the backing of the big powers in organized labor.
The STFU could count 150 active locals in Arkansas, 60 in Oklahoma (though some of these may have existed only on paper since Odis Sweeden did not have the money to keep himself in the field), and 15 or 20 others scattered about Tennessee, Missouri, and Mississippi. There were fifteen organizers on the job, and four or five more teaching or training at Commonwealth College. Some of the best were absent. Kester was in Nashville tending Alice, who was suffering from bursitis that crippled her left arm. Walter Moskop and E. B. McKinney were on an extended fund-raising venture to New York and Boston. A feud had flared between the two men at the Little Rock convention after Moskop, the white, had lost a close race for the union vice-presidency to McKinney, who called himself "black" even in those days when the term "colored" was more common. They traveled together so that each could keep an eye on the small sums of money they collected. Yet the members wanted to strike because they were desperate. Lula Parchman, the secretary of Local no. 2 at the St. John Plantation, spoke for many when she described her own situation.
I am a widow woman and tries to lives peaceable. . . . I would given them a days work every year I been here and payed rent in 1934. . . . its (3) three empty houses here now but this man is too unjust to let people live in them unless he can use them as tools for a little or nothing. . . . oh he is unjust. it is same as a slave farm. he aint got enough mules. nor food stuff neather wagon and trying to run a big plantation. . . . They work from sun to sun at one dollar $1.00 per day. Conditions are pityfull with we poor peoples. the landlords and renters on some farms is unjust and unfair if they cant work we poor people for nothing scarcely. they will tell us to move and claim that we wont work. . . . I want only a chance to make my own liveing and not the others get the profit of my labor and I suffer. I am tired of being drove from place to place and being denied of the chance to live independent. I dont want what belongs to others. I only want the portion due me for comfort.
Aiding in the strike was an organization of the unemployed in Memphis, the Workers' Alliance, which was supported by both Communists and Socialists. It was active in the Memphis slums among the people who waited in long lines each day tobe bused to Arkansas to work for 75 cents per day. With the cooperation of Dave Benson, the alliance organizer, the STFU executive council voted to ask these day laborers to stay off the job. The officers left it up to each STFU local whether to call the more vulnerable Arkansas tenant farmers on strike as well. Work was to stop on May 18, coincident with the beginning of the Cotton Carnival in Memphis.
On that day, members of the Memphis Workers' Alliance picketed the Tennessee side of the Harahan Bridge and forcibly prevented the trucks of labor recruiters from entering or leaving the city. Four of the picketers were arrested, and Police Chief Will Lee testified at their trial that the defendants had turned back seven hundred workers and unloaded forty trucks at the bridge. The word was out, and day laborers stopped coming to the morning lineup. From Cross County, Arkansas, W. L. Blackstone wrote, "I Believe the Strike Will go over—Dont you—We gaining ground Every Day Every thing looks good to me." Even AFL President Green seemed impressed, and he asked his affiliated unions to send contributions to the striking agricultural workers.
The reaction of the plantation owners was immediate. On the second day of the strike some thirty-five union members were rounded up in Earle and thrown into jail. Their crime was vagrancy; in other words, they were not in the fields chopping cotton. Reports reached Memphis from all over the Delta that men and women were being herded to the fields at gunpoint. To verify one of them, Evelyn Smith and Maxine East (Clay East's wife) sneaked onto the plantation of Earle City Marshal Paul D. Peacher and discovered a rude stockade in which thirteen black men were being held captive. The spies were apprehended by the marshal's men, however, and their camera was smashed. A second reconnaissance was made by Sherwood Eddy and a sharecropper named Roy Morlock. They got inside the stockade, took down the names of the prisoners, and got out unscathed. Driving away, however, they were picked up by two deputies and taken to a plantation commissary for questioning. But Eddy's talent was talk, and he persuaded the lawmen to release him. Once back to safety, he sent a telegram to United States Attorney General Homer Cummings which said: "I have today witnessed most flagrant violations of the Federal Peonage act by the killer P. D. Peacher in the lawless county of Crittenden, near Earle, Arkansas. Our histories should he revised in misleading us that slavery was ever abolished in Arkansas."
The union sent Newell Fowler, its attorney, and Aron Gilmartin of the Workers. Defense League back to the Crittenden "concentration camp" to demand the release of the prisoners, but Fowler got into a fistfight with a deputy, and Gilmartin was arrested for "disturbing labor." The young Socialist, who later became a Unitarian minister, had to post $150 bond to get out of the Earle jail.
The STFU's charges of involuntary servitude reached the desk of the United States attorney in Little Rock, a plantation owner named Fred A. Isgrig, who responded by saying that his office would need proof, such as signed statements from the workers held prisoner, before it could proceed. He added, "This is not intended to put the burden upon you to investigate, but at the same time you may know if the Government was put to the expense of chasing men all over the country simply on rumors we would not have any time left for the actual and active enforcement of the law."
Meanwhile the strike was failing. C. J. Spradling of Earle wrote: "Our Beloved President of Local #102 ... is in grave Danger. . . . Yesterday the 23rd Day of May Preacher and Dr. Watson was hunting for him with clubs and Boss Dulaney and Achy Landcaster and R. E. Moore has threating to hang his hide on a pole. I will tell you things is get serious around here." Before the strike was over this local president, Kelly Williams, was forced to leave the state.
Hughel Haywood and Jim Brown, officers of the Cecelia Local in Whitmore, wrote that "the strike is on in our community an it has got some of our members in critical condition they are Day Hand have no crops they have not nothing to eat an just about to get out of homes unless they continue to work like the land law say We who have crops are Dividing our food with them the best we can the way the thing is now we will soon Hafter quit . . . if we Dont thay will quit furnish us so we want to here from you at once just what to do about it Whether to tell them to go on to work or to Continue to obey the Strike order."
By the end of May the union was claiming only three thousand people on strike, down from five thousand at the beginning, and the local leaders met in Memphis to assess the situation. Rashly deciding to try to reverse their setbacks by counterattacking, they called for all of the tenants and sharecroppers who held allegiance to the STFU to join the day laborers on strike. They called it a "General Strike" and printed and shipped twenty-five thousand handbills to the locals. Certainly this was the most audacious and all-inclusive strike ever called among farm laborers in the South, and one of the least well supported.
Roving picket brigades, each numbering a hundred or more men and women, moved through the plantation backroads of Cross and St. Francis counties calling the stooped laborers to drop their hoes and join the strike. The tactic was quite successful. Governor Futrell called up the state militia, but when the troops arrived in one area, the picketers simply disbanded and regrouped in another. Dave Benson and a companion named Rose Mason joined the roving pickets, but since Benson was driving a car he was quickly located and arrested by the police. He was jailed in Forrest City on charges of rioting, interfering with labor, and having out-of- state license plates.
Clay East and a union attorney from Little Rock, M. D. Moody, came to Benson's trial on June 4. They got to see the organizer in jail and found him "scared to death," convinced that he was about to be lynched. He feared that any legal defense would only make matters worse. Obligingly, the attorney entered no plea, and Benson was fined $1,060, which he did not have, and was returned to jail.
James Myers, the industrial secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, was on a four-day fact-finding trip through Arkansas, and he watched these proceedings. A white-suited planter sat next to the churchman and remarked that they should lynch Benson and be done with it. Avers said that he was "a little surprised- to hear that and was told, "You'll be surprised at a Hell of a lot more things if you stay around here long enough." He took this to be a threat and left town immediately after the guilty verdict came in.
Had Myers stayed a few minutes longer he would have seen what the man was talking about. Clay East was set upon by a crowd of whites when he left the courtroom, and he was on his back kicking wildly at his attackers when Sheriff J. C. Campbell rescued him. The sheriff locked East in Benson's cell and made preparations to defend the jail. The swelling crowd surrounding the courthouse turned on other strangers, jostling and interrogating a reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Joe Jones, a highly acclaimed painter of Depression scenes who had rendered a mural of coal miners and sharecroppers for the Commonwealth College dining hall.
A contingent of Arkansas state rangers arrived just in time. East was shoved into a patrol car and raced to the Mississippi River Bridge with the sirens wailing. Benson was forced to remain, but the rangers stood guard until the mob dispersed. Fearing that the planters might use Rose Mason to frame Benson on a more serious charge, Mitchell sent her to the Highlander Folk School. When things calmed down later in the week, a judge lowered Benson's fine to $100, and he slipped out of town.
The Memphis police joined in on June 8 when they raided the home of E. B. McKinney. He was not caught, but the officers arrested five sharecroppers who had taken refuge there. All were sentenced to the workhouse on the charge of vagrancy.
From Earle, where City Marshal Peacher's stockade was located, union secretary Spradling wrote on June 8: "the planters are all mad. Today Dr. Watson and Roe Dulaney, and Buford Ray did give one negro woman a whipping with sticks and strape of leather. And Ed Isom white was Following the gang Dr. Watson Dulaney liked to Beat him to Death. Be sure and send protection here and send me as much money a you can for Relief." On the same day the STFU members in Crittenden County planned a march through Earle. Two of their leaders, Frank Weems, a black, and Jim Reese, a white, scouted around town before the march began and concluded that there were too many armed white men on the streets for safety. As they left town to warn the marchers, Weems and Reese were overtaken by several carloads of planters, who surrounded the pair and beat them senseless. When Reese came to he could not find Weems, and he assumed, as did almost everyone else, that the black man had been killed and his body dropped in the river.
The Weems murder received national publicity. Though there was no body, the Weems family and the union decided to hold a funeral service on Tuesday, June 16, at the Band Mill Church near Earle. Claude Williams, who was visiting in Memphis, volunteered to take over the pastoral duties. He set out on Monday morning for Crittenden County accompanied by Willie Sue Blagden. As they threaded through the backroads in search of the church, they were intercepted by a band of planters who hassled them into a soybean field and beat Williams bloody with a leather mule harness. The planters then turned their attention to Blagden. They were chivalrous enough to separate the barbed-wire strands so that she could climb into the field without scratching herself, but then they whipped her several times upon her thighs. Blagden was driven back to Earle and put on a train for Memphis. Williams, on the other hand, was driven around for hours while his captors talked about killing him. He was finally returned to his car and permitted to go. He arrived home in Little Rock in the early morning hours and collapsed in his wife's arms.
Though her treatment was by far the less severe, it was the "flogging" of Willie Sue Blagden that outraged critics across the South and the nation. Whatever brutal acts the Arkansas planters had committed in the past had been excused by a great many people on the grounds that they were in defense of southern values and virtues. But the planters had violated the code by frightening and hurting Blagden because she was a white woman from one of the best families in Memphis. The STFU, exhausted in treasure and morale after months of violence and a failing strike, was brought back to life by an outpouring of public sympathy and cash contributions.
Norman Thomas sent a telegram to President Roosevelt about the beating asking that he act "in this monstrous perversion of everything decent in the American tradition." Jack Glenn of the "March of Time" film series arrived in Memphis a week later to begin shooting a half-hour movie entitled Land of Cotton that would be seen in theaters across America. In the film, marching sharecroppers sang, Governor Futrell declared that there was no peonage in Arkansas, and Blagden and Williams reenacted their abduction and whipping. Their scene was the climax of the film.
The STFU executive council met in Muskogee on July 3 to declare the seven-week-old strike victorious. In fact, the 1936 strike had been a disastrous defeat. Wage increases were scarce, and the local organization was scattered. Had not the Blagden flogging and the resulting publicity occurred when they did, the union might have faded from history that summer.
Norman Thomas brought up Frank Weems's disappearance again in a speech he gave in September entitled "Arkansas’ Shame." "In this region there is or there was a man whose name has become a symbol for our shame. It is the name of Frank Weems, colored farmer." Where is Frank Weems, Thomas demanded. Months later Weems turned up alive in Chicago where he had fled after his beating. The union made public the story of his harrowing ordeal after his escape, but Weems's reappearance did not attract the same attention as his "death."
The only true victory to result from the 1936 cotton strike was the successful prosecution of Earle Marshal Peacher for holding workers in peonage. He was indicted on eight counts of violating the federal antislavery statutes. The STFU was jubilant, and the Workers' Defense League commemorated the event by distributing "Celebrate Arkansas Centennial, Abolish Peonage" stamps designed by Rockwell Kent. An assistant attorney general, Brien McMahon, was sent from Washington to present the case, and Peacher was found guilty on November 25 by an all-white jury and fined $3,500.
After local planters paid the fine, Peacher walked out of the courthouse a free man, but his conviction unhorsed one of the main adversaries of the sharecroppers' union. This case, the publicity generated by the STFU movement, and the dust storms that were burying Oklahoma made rural problems a key issue in the presidential campaign. A few days before the election, Roosevelt announced that he had ordered Henry Wallace to name a President's Committee on Farm Tenancy to recommend a new agricultural policy for the nation's poorest farmers. This committee would pave the way for the creation of the Farm Security Administration.
The simmering hostility between Socialists and Communists in the farm worker movement was intensified by the national spotlight. In October the STFU executive council ruled that it opposed sending union students to either Commonwealth College or the Highlander Folk School because neither school would allow whites and blacks to be in residence or in class at the same time due to state segregation laws. Actually, race had nothing to do with the decision but was used as an excuse to sever ties with Commonwealth. The officers believed the school had come under increasing Communist influence since the departure of its Socialist director, Richard Whitten. Furthermore, Walter Moskop, while in residence at Commonwealth, had staged a lunatic assassination attempt against H. L. Mitchell, and, though there was no evidence that Moskop's malice had any basis in political rivalry, Mitchell admitted that "this was the beginning of my anti-communist paranoia." The mention of Highlander in the ruling served mainly to obscure the issue since very few Arkansas sharecroppers had ever attended the school. It was also well known to the STFU officers that Highlander quietly but openly flouted Tennessee's race laws. To Myles Horton, Mitchell wrote: "Due to Commonwealth's interference into our affairs I am afraid that we can not send students even to Highlander for this year."
On a motion by Kester, the executive council also withdrew its endorsement of Donald Henderson's Rural Worker because Henderson had written an editorial espousing the Communist party line that sharecroppers and farm owners should be organized into one union and wage workers into another. This was precisely the course followed by the Share Croppers Union in Alabama. It turned its farm-operating members over to the National Farmers Union and created an Alabama Agricultural Workers Union, which was chartered by the AFL in 1937, to house its wage workers. The STFU had already refused to dismember itself along these lines, preferring instead a loose structure that enabled neighbors on the same plantation to be members of the same organization.
In taking a stand on Communism the STFU was entering a quagmire that confounded almost all of the radical movements of the 1930s. It was difficult to remain silent on the issue because Communist party members and sympathizers were a potent force in the labor and liberal community and because there was constant public pressure on all human rights organizations to define their political alignment clearly. The Highlander Folk School tried to find neutral ground by stating that it would work with and support all democratic groups, but, while this sounded fine to some liberal ears, it was unsatisfactory to many of those on the firing lines of political activism. The result, in Highlander's case, was that both Communists and Socialists tried at various times to sabotage the school's programs. The possibility of peaceful coexistence between those who saw Communism as the wave of the future and those who viewed it as a monstrous totalitarian scheme vanished rapidly as the decade progressed and as more was learned about Stalin's purge of his enemies and the USSR's dealings with Nazi Germany.
For a labor organization like the STFU to welcome the support of the Communist party would have been to commit organizational suicide considering the political climate of the South; yet to denounce Communism would leave the organization open to accusations of "red baiting" and destroy much of its prestige on the left. The union viewed its quiet salvos against Commonwealth College and Donald Henderson as a discreet declaration of independence from Communist influence, and at first they had the desired result. Henderson quickly apologized for his editorial, saying it was meant only to apply to the Share Croppers Union and that he had no intention of forcing the Communist line "down the throats" of the STFU, but the reconciliation did not take.
In particular, Henderson had not wanted to upset the delicate relationship between the STFU, the Share Croppers Union, his own periodical, and a farm workers local he was backing in New Jersey. All of these received equal shares of the money raised by an agency which Gardner Jackson had created, the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers. This arrangement, however, was very uncomfortable for some STFU supporters, like Norman Thomas, who complained that the good name of the STFU, earned through great hardship, was being used to raise money for the coffers of Communist unions. Walter White likewise objected that he had heard Clyde Johnson speak at a New York fund raiser, and it seemed to him that Johnson had tried to claim some credit for the peonage conviction of Marshal Peacher in Arkansas.
Gardner Jackson was under the impression that John L. Lewis, whose UMW was then financing a massive organizing drive in the steel industry, was about to announce a campaign to organize farm workers and hire Jackson to run it. This was an additional reason for the agricultural unions to appear to be friends. Jackson, therefore, had Mitchell, Kester, and Henderson accompany him to the AFL convention in Tampa, Florida, in November 1936 to lobby the CIO leaders, but their mission was lost sight of during the tumultuous meeting. After a prelude of mutual bombast and insult, the AFL formally expelled all ten CIO unions from the "House of Labor" and thereby divided skilled craftsmen and assembly-line workers into warring camps. In the months ahead the contest turned bloody as the competing labor giants tried to lasso each other's members. Mitchell met Donald Henderson for the first time in Tampa and formed an immediate dislike for the man. His impression was that "Henderson is a well-intentioned, zealous person, very hard to understand, but thoroughly devoted to his party and policies which it puts forward. Two or three centuries ago, such people as Henderson were out hunting witches, and it is to be regretted that they are now engaged in attempting to organize farm laborers."
When Reinhold Niebuhr asked Kester to explain exactly what were the differences between the STFU and the Share Croppers Union, he was told that the STFU was interracial while the SCU was entirely black, that the STFU was larger, claiming about fifty thousand members, and that the STFU was "non-political" while the SCU was "communistic." Although it was true that the Socialist party did not govern the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, it was certainly inaccurate to say that the union was nonpolitical. The STFU president, J. R. Butler, ran for governor of Arkansas in 1936 on the Socialist party ticket, and Claude Williams shared the bill as the party's candidate for the United States Senate. The socialist views of Kester, Mitchell, and E. B. McKinney were also quite pronounced. Mitchell and William Amberson joined Myles Horton, Elizabeth Hawes, and a handful of other party members in January 1937 at the Socialist Southern Conference in Norris, Tennessee. They heard Frank N. Trager, the party's labor secretary, call for "a real revolutionary organization for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism."
But the only "mass organizations" that the party was working with in the South, Trager admitted, were the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Workers' Alliance, and he stressed repeatedly that these must be kept out of the hands of the Communists. Pressures such as these upon the southern movement, originating with party tacticians in New York and Chicago, generated a feeling of hostility among activists who otherwise worked well together. The overall result was the fracturing of the radical movement throughout the region.
I am a widow woman and tries to lives peaceable. . . . I would given them a days work every year I been here and payed rent in 1934. . . . its (3) three empty houses here now but this man is too unjust to let people live in them unless he can use them as tools for a little or nothing. . . . oh he is unjust. it is same as a slave farm. he aint got enough mules. nor food stuff neather wagon and trying to run a big plantation. . . . They work from sun to sun at one dollar $1.00 per day. Conditions are pityfull with we poor peoples. the landlords and renters on some farms is unjust and unfair if they cant work we poor people for nothing scarcely. they will tell us to move and claim that we wont work. . . . I want only a chance to make my own liveing and not the others get the profit of my labor and I suffer. I am tired of being drove from place to place and being denied of the chance to live independent. I dont want what belongs to others. I only want the portion due me for comfort.
Aiding in the strike was an organization of the unemployed in Memphis, the Workers' Alliance, which was supported by both Communists and Socialists. It was active in the Memphis slums among the people who waited in long lines each day tobe bused to Arkansas to work for 75 cents per day. With the cooperation of Dave Benson, the alliance organizer, the STFU executive council voted to ask these day laborers to stay off the job. The officers left it up to each STFU local whether to call the more vulnerable Arkansas tenant farmers on strike as well. Work was to stop on May 18, coincident with the beginning of the Cotton Carnival in Memphis.
On that day, members of the Memphis Workers' Alliance picketed the Tennessee side of the Harahan Bridge and forcibly prevented the trucks of labor recruiters from entering or leaving the city. Four of the picketers were arrested, and Police Chief Will Lee testified at their trial that the defendants had turned back seven hundred workers and unloaded forty trucks at the bridge. The word was out, and day laborers stopped coming to the morning lineup. From Cross County, Arkansas, W. L. Blackstone wrote, "I Believe the Strike Will go over—Dont you—We gaining ground Every Day Every thing looks good to me." Even AFL President Green seemed impressed, and he asked his affiliated unions to send contributions to the striking agricultural workers.
The reaction of the plantation owners was immediate. On the second day of the strike some thirty-five union members were rounded up in Earle and thrown into jail. Their crime was vagrancy; in other words, they were not in the fields chopping cotton. Reports reached Memphis from all over the Delta that men and women were being herded to the fields at gunpoint. To verify one of them, Evelyn Smith and Maxine East (Clay East's wife) sneaked onto the plantation of Earle City Marshal Paul D. Peacher and discovered a rude stockade in which thirteen black men were being held captive. The spies were apprehended by the marshal's men, however, and their camera was smashed. A second reconnaissance was made by Sherwood Eddy and a sharecropper named Roy Morlock. They got inside the stockade, took down the names of the prisoners, and got out unscathed. Driving away, however, they were picked up by two deputies and taken to a plantation commissary for questioning. But Eddy's talent was talk, and he persuaded the lawmen to release him. Once back to safety, he sent a telegram to United States Attorney General Homer Cummings which said: "I have today witnessed most flagrant violations of the Federal Peonage act by the killer P. D. Peacher in the lawless county of Crittenden, near Earle, Arkansas. Our histories should he revised in misleading us that slavery was ever abolished in Arkansas."
The union sent Newell Fowler, its attorney, and Aron Gilmartin of the Workers. Defense League back to the Crittenden "concentration camp" to demand the release of the prisoners, but Fowler got into a fistfight with a deputy, and Gilmartin was arrested for "disturbing labor." The young Socialist, who later became a Unitarian minister, had to post $150 bond to get out of the Earle jail.
The STFU's charges of involuntary servitude reached the desk of the United States attorney in Little Rock, a plantation owner named Fred A. Isgrig, who responded by saying that his office would need proof, such as signed statements from the workers held prisoner, before it could proceed. He added, "This is not intended to put the burden upon you to investigate, but at the same time you may know if the Government was put to the expense of chasing men all over the country simply on rumors we would not have any time left for the actual and active enforcement of the law."
Meanwhile the strike was failing. C. J. Spradling of Earle wrote: "Our Beloved President of Local #102 ... is in grave Danger. . . . Yesterday the 23rd Day of May Preacher and Dr. Watson was hunting for him with clubs and Boss Dulaney and Achy Landcaster and R. E. Moore has threating to hang his hide on a pole. I will tell you things is get serious around here." Before the strike was over this local president, Kelly Williams, was forced to leave the state.
Hughel Haywood and Jim Brown, officers of the Cecelia Local in Whitmore, wrote that "the strike is on in our community an it has got some of our members in critical condition they are Day Hand have no crops they have not nothing to eat an just about to get out of homes unless they continue to work like the land law say We who have crops are Dividing our food with them the best we can the way the thing is now we will soon Hafter quit . . . if we Dont thay will quit furnish us so we want to here from you at once just what to do about it Whether to tell them to go on to work or to Continue to obey the Strike order."
By the end of May the union was claiming only three thousand people on strike, down from five thousand at the beginning, and the local leaders met in Memphis to assess the situation. Rashly deciding to try to reverse their setbacks by counterattacking, they called for all of the tenants and sharecroppers who held allegiance to the STFU to join the day laborers on strike. They called it a "General Strike" and printed and shipped twenty-five thousand handbills to the locals. Certainly this was the most audacious and all-inclusive strike ever called among farm laborers in the South, and one of the least well supported.
Roving picket brigades, each numbering a hundred or more men and women, moved through the plantation backroads of Cross and St. Francis counties calling the stooped laborers to drop their hoes and join the strike. The tactic was quite successful. Governor Futrell called up the state militia, but when the troops arrived in one area, the picketers simply disbanded and regrouped in another. Dave Benson and a companion named Rose Mason joined the roving pickets, but since Benson was driving a car he was quickly located and arrested by the police. He was jailed in Forrest City on charges of rioting, interfering with labor, and having out-of- state license plates.
Clay East and a union attorney from Little Rock, M. D. Moody, came to Benson's trial on June 4. They got to see the organizer in jail and found him "scared to death," convinced that he was about to be lynched. He feared that any legal defense would only make matters worse. Obligingly, the attorney entered no plea, and Benson was fined $1,060, which he did not have, and was returned to jail.
James Myers, the industrial secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, was on a four-day fact-finding trip through Arkansas, and he watched these proceedings. A white-suited planter sat next to the churchman and remarked that they should lynch Benson and be done with it. Avers said that he was "a little surprised- to hear that and was told, "You'll be surprised at a Hell of a lot more things if you stay around here long enough." He took this to be a threat and left town immediately after the guilty verdict came in.
Had Myers stayed a few minutes longer he would have seen what the man was talking about. Clay East was set upon by a crowd of whites when he left the courtroom, and he was on his back kicking wildly at his attackers when Sheriff J. C. Campbell rescued him. The sheriff locked East in Benson's cell and made preparations to defend the jail. The swelling crowd surrounding the courthouse turned on other strangers, jostling and interrogating a reporter for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and Joe Jones, a highly acclaimed painter of Depression scenes who had rendered a mural of coal miners and sharecroppers for the Commonwealth College dining hall.
A contingent of Arkansas state rangers arrived just in time. East was shoved into a patrol car and raced to the Mississippi River Bridge with the sirens wailing. Benson was forced to remain, but the rangers stood guard until the mob dispersed. Fearing that the planters might use Rose Mason to frame Benson on a more serious charge, Mitchell sent her to the Highlander Folk School. When things calmed down later in the week, a judge lowered Benson's fine to $100, and he slipped out of town.
The Memphis police joined in on June 8 when they raided the home of E. B. McKinney. He was not caught, but the officers arrested five sharecroppers who had taken refuge there. All were sentenced to the workhouse on the charge of vagrancy.
From Earle, where City Marshal Peacher's stockade was located, union secretary Spradling wrote on June 8: "the planters are all mad. Today Dr. Watson and Roe Dulaney, and Buford Ray did give one negro woman a whipping with sticks and strape of leather. And Ed Isom white was Following the gang Dr. Watson Dulaney liked to Beat him to Death. Be sure and send protection here and send me as much money a you can for Relief." On the same day the STFU members in Crittenden County planned a march through Earle. Two of their leaders, Frank Weems, a black, and Jim Reese, a white, scouted around town before the march began and concluded that there were too many armed white men on the streets for safety. As they left town to warn the marchers, Weems and Reese were overtaken by several carloads of planters, who surrounded the pair and beat them senseless. When Reese came to he could not find Weems, and he assumed, as did almost everyone else, that the black man had been killed and his body dropped in the river.
The Weems murder received national publicity. Though there was no body, the Weems family and the union decided to hold a funeral service on Tuesday, June 16, at the Band Mill Church near Earle. Claude Williams, who was visiting in Memphis, volunteered to take over the pastoral duties. He set out on Monday morning for Crittenden County accompanied by Willie Sue Blagden. As they threaded through the backroads in search of the church, they were intercepted by a band of planters who hassled them into a soybean field and beat Williams bloody with a leather mule harness. The planters then turned their attention to Blagden. They were chivalrous enough to separate the barbed-wire strands so that she could climb into the field without scratching herself, but then they whipped her several times upon her thighs. Blagden was driven back to Earle and put on a train for Memphis. Williams, on the other hand, was driven around for hours while his captors talked about killing him. He was finally returned to his car and permitted to go. He arrived home in Little Rock in the early morning hours and collapsed in his wife's arms.
Though her treatment was by far the less severe, it was the "flogging" of Willie Sue Blagden that outraged critics across the South and the nation. Whatever brutal acts the Arkansas planters had committed in the past had been excused by a great many people on the grounds that they were in defense of southern values and virtues. But the planters had violated the code by frightening and hurting Blagden because she was a white woman from one of the best families in Memphis. The STFU, exhausted in treasure and morale after months of violence and a failing strike, was brought back to life by an outpouring of public sympathy and cash contributions.
Norman Thomas sent a telegram to President Roosevelt about the beating asking that he act "in this monstrous perversion of everything decent in the American tradition." Jack Glenn of the "March of Time" film series arrived in Memphis a week later to begin shooting a half-hour movie entitled Land of Cotton that would be seen in theaters across America. In the film, marching sharecroppers sang, Governor Futrell declared that there was no peonage in Arkansas, and Blagden and Williams reenacted their abduction and whipping. Their scene was the climax of the film.
The STFU executive council met in Muskogee on July 3 to declare the seven-week-old strike victorious. In fact, the 1936 strike had been a disastrous defeat. Wage increases were scarce, and the local organization was scattered. Had not the Blagden flogging and the resulting publicity occurred when they did, the union might have faded from history that summer.
Norman Thomas brought up Frank Weems's disappearance again in a speech he gave in September entitled "Arkansas’ Shame." "In this region there is or there was a man whose name has become a symbol for our shame. It is the name of Frank Weems, colored farmer." Where is Frank Weems, Thomas demanded. Months later Weems turned up alive in Chicago where he had fled after his beating. The union made public the story of his harrowing ordeal after his escape, but Weems's reappearance did not attract the same attention as his "death."
The only true victory to result from the 1936 cotton strike was the successful prosecution of Earle Marshal Peacher for holding workers in peonage. He was indicted on eight counts of violating the federal antislavery statutes. The STFU was jubilant, and the Workers' Defense League commemorated the event by distributing "Celebrate Arkansas Centennial, Abolish Peonage" stamps designed by Rockwell Kent. An assistant attorney general, Brien McMahon, was sent from Washington to present the case, and Peacher was found guilty on November 25 by an all-white jury and fined $3,500.
After local planters paid the fine, Peacher walked out of the courthouse a free man, but his conviction unhorsed one of the main adversaries of the sharecroppers' union. This case, the publicity generated by the STFU movement, and the dust storms that were burying Oklahoma made rural problems a key issue in the presidential campaign. A few days before the election, Roosevelt announced that he had ordered Henry Wallace to name a President's Committee on Farm Tenancy to recommend a new agricultural policy for the nation's poorest farmers. This committee would pave the way for the creation of the Farm Security Administration.
The simmering hostility between Socialists and Communists in the farm worker movement was intensified by the national spotlight. In October the STFU executive council ruled that it opposed sending union students to either Commonwealth College or the Highlander Folk School because neither school would allow whites and blacks to be in residence or in class at the same time due to state segregation laws. Actually, race had nothing to do with the decision but was used as an excuse to sever ties with Commonwealth. The officers believed the school had come under increasing Communist influence since the departure of its Socialist director, Richard Whitten. Furthermore, Walter Moskop, while in residence at Commonwealth, had staged a lunatic assassination attempt against H. L. Mitchell, and, though there was no evidence that Moskop's malice had any basis in political rivalry, Mitchell admitted that "this was the beginning of my anti-communist paranoia." The mention of Highlander in the ruling served mainly to obscure the issue since very few Arkansas sharecroppers had ever attended the school. It was also well known to the STFU officers that Highlander quietly but openly flouted Tennessee's race laws. To Myles Horton, Mitchell wrote: "Due to Commonwealth's interference into our affairs I am afraid that we can not send students even to Highlander for this year."
On a motion by Kester, the executive council also withdrew its endorsement of Donald Henderson's Rural Worker because Henderson had written an editorial espousing the Communist party line that sharecroppers and farm owners should be organized into one union and wage workers into another. This was precisely the course followed by the Share Croppers Union in Alabama. It turned its farm-operating members over to the National Farmers Union and created an Alabama Agricultural Workers Union, which was chartered by the AFL in 1937, to house its wage workers. The STFU had already refused to dismember itself along these lines, preferring instead a loose structure that enabled neighbors on the same plantation to be members of the same organization.
In taking a stand on Communism the STFU was entering a quagmire that confounded almost all of the radical movements of the 1930s. It was difficult to remain silent on the issue because Communist party members and sympathizers were a potent force in the labor and liberal community and because there was constant public pressure on all human rights organizations to define their political alignment clearly. The Highlander Folk School tried to find neutral ground by stating that it would work with and support all democratic groups, but, while this sounded fine to some liberal ears, it was unsatisfactory to many of those on the firing lines of political activism. The result, in Highlander's case, was that both Communists and Socialists tried at various times to sabotage the school's programs. The possibility of peaceful coexistence between those who saw Communism as the wave of the future and those who viewed it as a monstrous totalitarian scheme vanished rapidly as the decade progressed and as more was learned about Stalin's purge of his enemies and the USSR's dealings with Nazi Germany.
For a labor organization like the STFU to welcome the support of the Communist party would have been to commit organizational suicide considering the political climate of the South; yet to denounce Communism would leave the organization open to accusations of "red baiting" and destroy much of its prestige on the left. The union viewed its quiet salvos against Commonwealth College and Donald Henderson as a discreet declaration of independence from Communist influence, and at first they had the desired result. Henderson quickly apologized for his editorial, saying it was meant only to apply to the Share Croppers Union and that he had no intention of forcing the Communist line "down the throats" of the STFU, but the reconciliation did not take.
In particular, Henderson had not wanted to upset the delicate relationship between the STFU, the Share Croppers Union, his own periodical, and a farm workers local he was backing in New Jersey. All of these received equal shares of the money raised by an agency which Gardner Jackson had created, the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers. This arrangement, however, was very uncomfortable for some STFU supporters, like Norman Thomas, who complained that the good name of the STFU, earned through great hardship, was being used to raise money for the coffers of Communist unions. Walter White likewise objected that he had heard Clyde Johnson speak at a New York fund raiser, and it seemed to him that Johnson had tried to claim some credit for the peonage conviction of Marshal Peacher in Arkansas.
Gardner Jackson was under the impression that John L. Lewis, whose UMW was then financing a massive organizing drive in the steel industry, was about to announce a campaign to organize farm workers and hire Jackson to run it. This was an additional reason for the agricultural unions to appear to be friends. Jackson, therefore, had Mitchell, Kester, and Henderson accompany him to the AFL convention in Tampa, Florida, in November 1936 to lobby the CIO leaders, but their mission was lost sight of during the tumultuous meeting. After a prelude of mutual bombast and insult, the AFL formally expelled all ten CIO unions from the "House of Labor" and thereby divided skilled craftsmen and assembly-line workers into warring camps. In the months ahead the contest turned bloody as the competing labor giants tried to lasso each other's members. Mitchell met Donald Henderson for the first time in Tampa and formed an immediate dislike for the man. His impression was that "Henderson is a well-intentioned, zealous person, very hard to understand, but thoroughly devoted to his party and policies which it puts forward. Two or three centuries ago, such people as Henderson were out hunting witches, and it is to be regretted that they are now engaged in attempting to organize farm laborers."
When Reinhold Niebuhr asked Kester to explain exactly what were the differences between the STFU and the Share Croppers Union, he was told that the STFU was interracial while the SCU was entirely black, that the STFU was larger, claiming about fifty thousand members, and that the STFU was "non-political" while the SCU was "communistic." Although it was true that the Socialist party did not govern the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, it was certainly inaccurate to say that the union was nonpolitical. The STFU president, J. R. Butler, ran for governor of Arkansas in 1936 on the Socialist party ticket, and Claude Williams shared the bill as the party's candidate for the United States Senate. The socialist views of Kester, Mitchell, and E. B. McKinney were also quite pronounced. Mitchell and William Amberson joined Myles Horton, Elizabeth Hawes, and a handful of other party members in January 1937 at the Socialist Southern Conference in Norris, Tennessee. They heard Frank N. Trager, the party's labor secretary, call for "a real revolutionary organization for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism."
But the only "mass organizations" that the party was working with in the South, Trager admitted, were the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Workers' Alliance, and he stressed repeatedly that these must be kept out of the hands of the Communists. Pressures such as these upon the southern movement, originating with party tacticians in New York and Chicago, generated a feeling of hostility among activists who otherwise worked well together. The overall result was the fracturing of the radical movement throughout the region.
[Photographer Lange went back one year later, June 1937. Here's what she found.]
Approach to the Delta cooperative farm from highway, cooperative store in foreground. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
Cabins at the Delta cooperative farms. Hillhouse, Mississippi. Screen windows and porches are uncommon in cotton cabins (1937 June) Lange
Cabins at the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
Delta cooperative farm cabins and cotton. Hillhouse, Mississippi, after one year of operation (1937 June) Lange
The cooperative store at the Delta cooperative farm near Clarksdale, Mississippi (1937 June-July) Lange
Children of the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June-July) Lange
Cultivating cotton on the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 june-July) Lange
Hillhouse, Mississippi Delta cooperative farm (1937 June) Lange
I've never seen plowing like in the above photo. They appear to be using the type of plow normally operated (controlled) by one man and pulled by a mule but in this case being pulled by a tractor. Seems to be five plows, spanning four rows with four plow men. Are they a man short? The guy on the right appears to be operating one and one-half plows. (? ? ?)
Hillhouse, Mississippi Delta cooperative farm (1937 June) Lange
This photo seems to clear things up considerably. Close inspection reveals there are actually eight independently pulled plows. The outer two are solos. The inner six have two (independent) plows per middle (furrow, for you non-farmers). So each man is controlling the horizontal position of two - one either side of a row. More efficient schemes have the horizontal position (relative to the tractor) fixed and, for getting the most weeds without plowing up cotton, the onus is on the initial set-up, which is bolted down, and the attention/skill of the driver. Understand it. But never saw it. Very inefficient. Takes five men instead of one. But, remember, these guys are socialists. Probably makes sense to them.
Member of the Delta cooperative farm at Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
Member of the Delta cooperative farm at Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
Delta cooperative farm, Hillhouse. Clarence Weems, a young co-operator on the farm. He remembers the evictions in Arkansas - his father was beaten and disappeared. (1937 June) Lange
Newly erected community house at the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi. This building houses the library, school, clinic and meeting rooms (1937 June-July) Lange
One of Delta cooperative farmsteads after a year of operation. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
One of the farmers at the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 june-July) Lange
Young baby born on the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June-July) Lange
Planting corn in the community garden which supplies fresh vegetables to twenty-eight families. Delta cooperative farms. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
The poultry unit of the Delta cooperative farm. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
Working in the community garden which supplies fresh vegetables to twenty-eight families at the Delta cooperative farms. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1937 June) Lange
[And the one below is labeled as 1938, two years after the start. But I wonder . . . LOC has messed up a few other captions. A trip back to this socialist experiment and take only one photograph? Not likely, I think.]
Delta cooperative farms in 1938. Hillhouse, Mississippi (1938) Lange
Extra stuff
Under the 'For Rent' sign, through the door, one flight up, is the headquarters of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Memphis, Tennessee (1937 Jun) Lange
[Note the 'delivery vehicles' out front. - GY]
J.R. Butler, President of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union. Memphis, Tennessee (1938 Jun) Lange
If you'd like to know what became of the Hillhouse Cooperative Farm, here's a short write-up called
Hillhouse - the rest of the story.
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Obviously, the FSA was on the scene to record these events. Stryker sent one of his best photographers - Dorothea Lange**. She took all the above photos except the seven early ones (January 1936) by Vachon (top of this page).
[As an aside, John F. Vachon was not at the time an FSA photographer. He was just out of college and, after five or six months being unemployed (It was The Depression, remember?), found a job working in Stryker's office as a clerk/messenger. When news of the January evictions arrived, Stryker had no photographer available to cover this "must do" assignment. He sent Vachon - who had never done any photography whatsoever. Later, Vachon grew interested, learned the skill/art and was a photographer for FSA in 1942-43. Later, for over twenty five years beginning in 1947 he was a staff photographer at Look magazine.]
From 1935 to 1939, Dorothea Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.
You will find her name tagged to many of the FSA photos taken all around the Mississippi Delta region; she was as active in the region as Marion Post Wolcott.
You probably knew of her work already and didn't realize it. Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in Dorothea Lange's photo Migrant Mother is Florence Owens Thompson, an iconic image of the Great Depression. The Library of Congress label for the Migrant Mother image is "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California."
"Migrant Mother"
Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California (1936 Feb or Mar) Lange
* Howard Kester was an American preacher, organizer, and activist, most known for his work organizing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) beginning in 1934. His work was inspired by a radical version of Christianity called the Social Gospel, influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr among others, and a Marxist critique of the Southern economy. A white Southerner himself, he firmly believed that the only way to create a new "Eden" was to end racial strife by uniting poor black and whites around a common cause. His views on race began when, as a college student in 1923, he toured Poland with the YMCA. After visiting a Jewish ghetto he began to see a parallel between Europe's treatment of Jews and America's treatment of blacks. Kester worked with numerous organizations throughout his life that sought equality in the United States: NAACP, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and the Committee on Economic and Racial Justice. In 1936 he published Revolt Among the Sharecroppers on behalf of the STFU.
** Dorothea Lange Biography with Photo Gallery
** Dorothea Lange Biography with Photo Gallery
