REELTOWN RADICALS REELTOWN RADICALSStrength is a matter of a made-up mind.
—John Beecher, “Reflections of a Man Who Once Stood Up for Freedom”
In November 1932, Walter Parker, a white Macon County planter, called in a loan he’d made to his black cropper Cliff James. James had put money down to buy some of Parker’s land that he was already working. Parker demanded the $950 remaining balance immediately and refused to grant an extension. After all the trouble the black croppers were causing, and especially after Camp Hill, Parker was through helping any of them buy land. He also suspected that Cliff James was up to no good—likely working with the Reds organizing the croppers around Reeltown. Parker was right. James was working with Al Murphy.
Parker turned the note over to a Dadeville lawyer, who instructed Sheriff Young to serve a writ of attachment on James’s two cows and two mules. On December 19, Sheriff Young, who was still recuperating from the bullet he’d taken at Camp Hill, sent Deputy Witt Elder to serve the papers and take the animals. Without his animals, James couldn’t farm and he would fall further into debt.
When Deputy Elder arrived, James ran him off the property. Elder swore he would “get some men and come back and kill you niggers in a pile.”1 When Elder returned with reinforcements, James’s neighbors were waiting. They were armed and surrounding his livestock pen. It was a standoff until one of the deputies shot and killed cropper Jim McMullen. In the chaos that followed, both Deputy Elder and Cliff James were wounded. Three croppers were also injured, and one of the deputies was dead.
Walter Parker was furious. He told Sheriff Young that he believed James was a ringleader in “that nigger union.” Young promised that he would take care of him.
Deputy Elder was taken to a local hospital, but Cliff James traveled eleven miles to Tuskegee’s Veterans’ Hospital for treatment. Dr. Eugene Dibble, the black medical director, treated his wounds and then called the Macon County sheriff.2
Dibble was in the middle of a collaborative study in partnership with the public health service and the state and county health departments to “observe the effects of untreated syphilis on black men.” Since Macon County was 82 percent black and had a high incidence of the disease, it was considered a prime research site. Dibble agreed that even if there were no funds to treat syphilis, an “observation study” could determine the disease’s natural course. After all, the U.S. Surgeon General had assured Tuskegee superintendent Robert Moton that the results of the study “could have a marked bearing on the treatment, or conversely the non-necessity of treatment, of latent syphilis.” Dibble knew that everything would be lost if he was caught assisting black revolutionaries.3
Over the next forty years, the Andrew Memorial Veteran’s Hospital followed four hundred syphilitic sharecroppers without treating any of them—despite a promise of free medical care for participating in a study to determine if they had “bad blood.”
Dibble’s call to the sheriff resulted in Cliff James landing in the Montgomery County Jail, where his neighbors Jud Simpson, Milo Bentley (who’d suffered a severe head injury), and Ned Cobb were being held. Fears of race war swept white Tallapoosa. Still, Sheriff Young was apparently unable to raise a local posse of white croppers, so he was forced to recruit from the neighboring counties of Macon, Elmore, and Lee. He deputized nearly five hundred men, directed them to Reeltown, and told them that he’d found a union membership list in James’s home. They were ordered to round up the croppers on that list and any other croppers they came across. They understood. Black croppers were beaten and jailed randomly, and four were killed before Young congratulated them for having put down this long-anticipated outbreak of race war.4
SheriffYoung and his vigilantes had conducted a three-day reign of terror. Whole families fled into the woods for safety, and W. S. Hanson, a white Tallapoosa physician, reported treating more than a dozen black men for gunshot wounds.
The five croppers who’d tried to protect James’s animals were indicted for assault with intent to kill despite the fact that Deputy Elder could not produce the court order directing him to seize James’s property. Louis Kaufman (of the Norman Thomas Study Club) posted their bail ($750 each), and Rabbi Goldstein arranged lodging for the ILD attorneys who came to represent them.
Goldstein, Jane Speed, Darlie Speed, and Jane’s aunt Jean Read went to Governor Miller’s office to demand an investigation. Read summarized that meeting in an open letter to the Montgomery Advertiser:
“We pointed out [to the governor] that the attorney for the arrested men was not allowed to see them except in the presence of the sheriff, and that two of them, Judson Simpson and Milo Bentley, were lying seriously wounded in jail. The Governor said that no sheriff had the right to prevent an attorney from conferring with his clients, and that the attorney could appeal for a court order restraining the sheriff from interfering. However, the court order would have to be executed by the sheriff himself.”5
Disgusted, they drove to Reeltown, where Deputy Elder refused to speak with them and his son threatened to “get them all.”6 By the time they returned to Montgomery, Cliff James had died. Milo Bently died the following day. The rabbi invited the city’s black ministers to his home on South Perry Street to organize food and clothing drives for the croppers, and the ILD’s Donald Burke organized a double funeral for them on January 2 and a rally in Birmingham’s Black Phythian Temple. There, eulogizers blasted Dr. Dibble and Tuskegee superintendent Robert Moton for their betrayal of James.
Their bodies lay in state for a week at the Jordan Funeral Home before three thousand blacks followed their red-flag-draped coffins to Grace Hill Cemetery.7 This massive turnout agitated, angered, and terrified white Birmingham, who held the Reds responsible.
But this time even some white Alabamians were expressing sympathy for the Reeltown croppers and criticizing the sheriff’s brutality. An editorial in the white Birmingham Post allowed that “the causes of the trouble are essentially economic. . . . The resistance of the Negroes at Reeltown against officers seeking to attach their livestock on a lien bears a close parallel to battles fought in Iowa and Wisconsin between farmers and sheriff’s deputies seeking to serve eviction papers. A good many white farmers, ground down by the same relentless economic pressure from which the Negroes were suffering, expressed sympathy with the Negroes’ desperate plot.”8
In April 1933, the five croppers who’d defended James’s property went to trial. Former senator “Cotton Tom” Heflin prosecuted, and ILD attorneys Irving Schwab and George Chamlee represented them. All were found guilty and sentenced to between five and fifteen years in prison. They served, on average, ten years.
The agricultural “economic trouble” the Birmingham Post article had alluded to steadily worsened in the Black Belt.9 A great deal of hope was therefore invested in the November 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt, particularly after he muscled his Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) through Congress during his first hundred days. The AAA created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, charged with solving the farm crisis. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was given authority to control farm production and to purchase surpluses.
An Iowa native who’d planted corn and raised hogs, Secretary Wallace knew very little about cotton farming. He understood, however, that the laws of supply and demand always worked against farmers—the more they produced, the lower market prices fell. So, he proposed an emergency surplus crop reduction plan to create artificial scarcity and to stimulate a demand for produce.
Under Wallace’s direction, cotton, rice, and tobacco farmers who agreed to reduce their acreage by 30 percent were eligible for a federal subsidy of $11 for each acre left fallow. Once markets rallied, the subsidies would end. Farming was a business, Secretary Wallace maintained, and like any business it would respond to production control. The beauty of the plan was its simplicity—or so he thought.
Wallace delegated the plan’s administration to state extension service networks, which in Alabama included the farm bureau. Unfortunately, this led to unanticipated and generally disastrous consequences. Because the spring planting had already begun by the time the legislation took effect (and because Wallace was unwilling to hold off payments for another season), planters who applied for subsidy payments for 1933 were required to plow under a quarter of their crops. The AAA paid a total of $161,777,697.00 to destroy ten million acres of cotton, soybeans, and corn.10 Millions more were spent to destroy perfectly healthy farm animals. Starving Americans were at first stunned, then enraged. Destroying healthy crops and animals in an attempt to restart the stalled economy seemed both a colossal and cruel waste.
Displacement of sharecroppers was a major consequence of the AAA. The land most planters chose to leave fallow was acreage that they leased. Since the crop was the tenants’ only asset, when it was removed they had no basis on which to access credit. The controversial decision to mail federal subsidy payments directly to landlords and to assume that they would refund their croppers’ losses, based on their percentage of the harvest, created another crisis.
Cully Cobb, the AAA’s Cotton Section administrator, a southerner who understood that white planters would never voluntarily participate in a program that paid black croppers directly, insisted that the landlords be compensated and that they provide for their croppers and tenants. Consequentially, most croppers never received any compensation. Many planters considered reimbursing croppers as simply “paying them not to work.” Croppers who protested were threatened with eviction.
The ham-handed implementation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act highlighted the administration’s ignorance of the farm tenancy system. The crop reduction program actually incentivized landowners to evict croppers and tenants. Planters jumped at the opportunity to free themselves from the demands of these landless farmers. They were only too happy to hire them as hourly cotton choppers and pickers. They’d apparently forgotten that the cumbersome sharecropper arrangement had been engineered and subsequently maintained to protect white privilege.
Walter White of the NAACP petitioned the Roosevelt administration to stop paying subsidies until an equitable distribution process could be designed, but he was ignored. In Alabama, the conservative Farm Bureau and Extension Service continued to administer the program. John P. Davis, a future founder of the National Negro Congress, wrote that the federal government “failed absolutely to protect the equities of the tenant. . . . Yet the administration in Washington—like Pontius Pilate—washed its hands of the whole matter and left it to the consciences of the white plantation owners of the South to see that justice was done.”11