During the Great Depression, the already dreadful conditions of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and other small farmers and farm laborers in the South grew worse. These farmworkers, disproportionately African American, were confronted with the loss of their livelihood as well as eviction from their homes because of a combination of low crop prices and the policies of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which favored large landowners. In response, a small group of black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in Arkansas in July 1934. Although met with violence, repression, economic retaliation, and threats of lynching by local officials and large landowners, the STFU, supported by Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, attracted a membership of some 25,000 within a few years.
In an attempt to raise prices in agriculture, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 subsidized farmers to limit crop production, but big landowners rarely shared these funds with the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who worked the land. Such farmworkers were thus subject to both a major reduction in their already meager income and a lack of federal assistance. Additionally, when landowners were required to distribute part of the subsidies to those who lived and worked on their lands, they often evicted the workers to avoid giving them any share of the funds.
Over the next several years, the STFU organized strikes for greater compensation, led the struggles against evictions and for the direct distribution of AAA payments to tenant farmers and sharecroppers, and worked for ANTIlynching legislation to help protect their members from violence. In January 1939, almost 2,000 tenant farmers and sharecroppers, many of them evicted from their homes, appealed for help from the federal government by camping along Highway 61 in Missouri for nearly a week until they were forcibly removed. Despite such pleas, as well as requests by some federal investigators and New Deal officials, neither Congress nor President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded favorably to the STFU agenda because of strong opposition by southern legislators.
Although beset by internal disputes as well as external opposition, and in sharp decline by the end of the 1930s, the STFU brought attention to the conditions of African Americans and the poor in the rural South and is considered a milestone in successful interracial labor organizing.
Further reading: Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Center: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
—Aimee Alice Pohl