“Fifty cents a day Lord for working in the field
just four bits Lord for a good strong hand
from dawn to dark Lord from can till can't
ain't no way Lord a man can come out.
They's got to be a way Lord show us the way. . . .”
And then they sang.
“Go Down Moses” was the song they sang
“Go down Moses, way down in Egyptland. . . .”
—John Beecher
The rural world Communist organizers entered in 1930–31 made the poverty-stricken streets of Birmingham look like a paradise. Cotton farmers were in the midst of a crisis at least a decade old. After World War I, cotton prices plummeted, forcing planters to reduce acreage despite rising debts, and the boll weevil destroyed large stretches of the crop. When the stock market collapsed and cotton prices reached an all-time low, the real victims were small landholders who were forced into tenancy and tenants whose material well-being deteriorated even further.1 It is no coincidence, therefore, that black farmers straddling the line between tenancy and ownership formed the nucleus of Alabama's Communist-led rural movement.
Within the limited world of cotton culture existed a variety of production relations. Cash tenants, more often white than black, usually leased land for several years at a time, supplied their own implements, draft animals, seed, feed, and fertilizer, and farmed without supervision. Share tenants, on the other hand, might own some draft animals and planting materials, but the landowner provided any additional equipment, shelter, and if necessary, advances of cash, food, or other subsistence goods such as clothing. Verbal contracts were made annually and the landowner generally marketed the crop, giving the tenant between three-fourths and two-thirds of the price, minus any advances or previous debts. The most common form of tenancy in the South was sharecropping. Virtually property less workers paid with a portion of the crops raised, sharecroppers had little choice but to cultivate cotton—the landowner's choice of staple crops. The landowner supplied the acreage, houses, draft animals, planting materials, and nearly all subsistence necessities, including food and cash advances. These “furnishings” were then deducted from the sharecropper's portion of the crop at an incredibly high interest rate. The system not only kept most tenants in debt, but it perpetuated living conditions that bordered on intolerable. Landowners furnished entire families with poorly constructed one- or two-room shacks, usually without running water or adequate sanitary facilities. Living day-to-day on a diet of “fat back,” beans, molasses, and cornbread, most Southern tenants suffered from nutritional deficiencies—pellagra and rickets were particularly common diseases in the black belt.2
Sharecropping family, near Eutaw, Alabama (photograph by Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration, courtesy Library of Congress)
The gradations of tenancy must be understood in relation to both race and the geographic distribution of cotton production. The black belt, the throne of King Cotton in Alabama, with its rich, black, calcareous clay soil, still resembled its antebellum past in that blacks outnumbered whites four to one in some counties in 1930.3 As with other cotton growing areas, the plant's life cycle and seasonal needs determined the labor and living patterns of those who worked the land. In early spring, after the land had thawed and dried from winter, cotton farmers plowed and fertilized rows in preparation for planting, which followed several weeks later. When the young plants began to sprout, the cotton had to be “chopped”—grass and weeds were removed and the stalks separated so that they did not grow too close together. If this was not done regularly the crop could be lost. Picking time, the most intense period of labor involving all family members, began around September 1 and continued through October. Once the cotton had been picked, ginned, baled, and sold, accounts were settled between the tenant and the landowner. The tenants, who usually found themselves empty-handed after settling accounts, cultivated gardens to survive the winter, begged for food and cash advances, or spent several days without anything to eat. And throughout the entire year, particularly during the lean winters, tenants hauled firewood, cut hay, repaired their homes, fences, tools, and watering holes, cared for their stock, cleared trees, and removed stalks from the previous harvest.4
Women's lives were especially hard in the world of cotton culture. Rising before dawn and the rest of family, the wives and daughters of tenant farmers prepared meals over a wood stove or open fire; fetched water from distant wells or springs; washed laundry by hand in pots of boiling water; toted firewood; tended livestock; made preserves, dyes, clothes, and medicinal remedies; ground corn meal; gathered eggs; and tried to keep a house that generally lacked screens, windows, indoor plumbing, and electricity tidy. Women also worked in the fields, especially during picking and chopping time, and in the midst of physically exacting labor they bore and raised children. Many had little choice but to take in laundry or perform domestic work for meager wages, thus tripling their work load. Women choppers and pickers generally earned half as much as their male co-workers. To make matters worse, because husbands and elder sons occasionally migrated to nearby cities or mines to find work, escape family responsibilities, or avoid persecution in one form or another, many women and children in a variety of female-headed households and extended families were left to organize production without the benefit of adult male labor.5
It was not unusual for a black woman to manage household finances and negotiate the year-end settlements with her landlord. On some plantations the woman's role as spokesperson was a defensive measure. When a black man appeared to settle his debts, the landlord's wife sometimes negotiated in her husband's place so that if the sharecropper objected to the final agreement, the landlord could accuse him of “insulting a white woman.” The presence of the sharecropper's wife or eldest daughter in his place mitigated the landlord's ability to construe the dialogue as a violation of white womanhood.6 Black women were also more likely to be literate and have more formal education than black men. According to the 1940 Census, more black women than black men obtained formal education beyond five to six years. In the black belt counties where the illiteracy rate among African-Americans was as high as 35 and 40 percent in 1940, the ability to read and write could determine a sharecropper's success or failure. In several cases, women proved so important as managers that in some families their unexpected death or illness meant total ruin of an already precarious financial situation. “As long as mother lived,” recalled a member of the Share Croppers’ Union in Tallapoosa County, “she managed some way and kept us in school, but the boss took everything away from father until he would be so worried he would not know what to do.”7
It is tempting to characterize the black belt as a timeless, static, semifeudal remnant of the post-Reconstruction era, but such an idyllic picture ignores the history of rural opposition and does not take into account significant structural changes that have occurred since the 1890s. Black and white populists waged a losing battle against the expansion of tenancy, and in the wake of defeat, many landless farmers resisted debt peonage with their feet. Drowning in a sea of debt, tenants often broke their contracts, leaving an unsuspecting landowner at a critical moment in the planting cycle. Given the demography of the plantation, open collective rebellion was virtually impossible. Shacks were placed near the edge of the plantation, and two or three miles often separated tenant families from one another. Therefore, more individualized forms of resistance (theft, arson, sabotage, “foot dragging,” slander, and occasional outbreaks of personal violence) were used effectively to wrest small material gains or to retaliate against unfair landlords. Such tactics were legitimated by folk cultures that celebrated evasive and cunning activities and, ironically, by the dominant ideology of racist paternalism that constructed an image of blacks as naturally ignorant, childlike, shiftless laborers with a strong penchant for theft.8
Resistance, in some ways, altered the structure of production as well as the planters’ ability to make a profit. With the onset of World War I, for example, large numbers of workers left the countryside altogether to take advantage of employment opportunities in the sprawling urban centers of the North and South. Areas most affected by the exodus were forced to adopt limited forms of mechanization to make up for the dwindling labor force and rising wages. The movement off the land was accompanied by improved roads and the availability of affordable automobiles, which increased rural mobility. The number of automobiles owned and operated by Alabama farmers increased from 16,592 in 1920 to 73,634 in 1930. Small holders and tenants who acquired vehicles were no longer beholden to the plantation commissary and could now purchase supplies at much lower prices in the nearby urban centers. The revolution in transportation compelled landowners to furnish tenants in cash in lieu of credit lines at plantation commissaries and county stores in an attempt to retain rural labor in the face of competitive wages offered in the cities. But after 1929, cash was a rare commodity, and landowners resurrected the commissary system, effectively undermining their tenants’ newly acquired freedom and mobility.9
By the time Birmingham Communists established links to the cotton belt early in 1931, tenancy seemed on the verge of collapse. Advances of food and cash were cut off, debts were piling higher, and the city offered fewer opportunities to escape rural poverty. Subterranean forms of resistance were by no means abandoned, but groups of black farmers now saw the logic in the CP's call for collective action.
The slogan demanding self-determination in the black belt did not inspire Birmingham's nascent Communist cadre to initiate a rural-based radical movement. The 1930 “Draft Program for Negro Farmers in the Southern States” expressed the Central Committee's doubt as to the ability of black sharecroppers and tenants to create an autonomous radical movement, and a few months later James Allen, editor of the Southern Worker, argued that only industrial workers were capable of leading tenants and sharecroppers because the latter lacked the collective experience of industrial labor. Aside from spouting rhetorical slogans, Party organizers all but ignored the black belt during their first year in Birmingham. Indeed, their first taste of rural organizing was in northern Alabama among a small group of white tenant farmers who had asked the TUUL for help obtaining government relief.10
Then, in January 1931, an uprising of some five hundred sharecroppers in England, Arkansas, compelled Southern Communists to take the rural poor more seriously. Birmingham Party leaders immediately issued a statement exhorting Alabama farmers to follow the Arkansas example: “Call mass meetings in each township and on each large plantation. Set up farmers Relief Councils at these meetings. Organize hunger marches on the towns to demand food and clothing from the supply merchants and bankers who have sucked you dry year after year. . . . Join hands with the unemployed workers of the towns and with their organizations which are fighting the same battle for bread.”11
The response was startling. The Southern Worker was flooded with letters from poor black Alabama farmers. A sharecropper from Waverly, Alabama, requested “full information on this Fight Against Starvation,” and pledged to “do like the Arkansas farmers” with the assistance of Communist organizers. A Shelby County tenant made a similar request: “We farmers in Vincent wish to know more about the Communist Party, an organization that fights for all farmers. And also to learn us how to fight for better conditions.” Another “farmer correspondent” had already made plans to “get a bunch together for a meeting,” adding that poor farmers in his community were “mighty close to the breaking point.”12
In February Angelo Herndon was sent to Wilcox County to address a group of sharecroppers who had begun meeting regularly under the leadership of a local black minister. Sensing the group's distress, he elected to stay longer than intended and began organizing a union under the auspices of the United Farmers’ League. But once authorities learned of his activities, he was forced to flee the county.13
Despite Herndon's experience, district leadership enthusiastically laid plans for a sharecroppers’ and farm workers’ union that would conceivably unite poor white farmers of northern Alabama and black tenants and sharecroppers in the black belt. An attempt to bring black and white farmers together in a joint conference, however, brought few results. The Party's position on social equality and equal rights alienated most poor white farmers, and within a few months the Party's white contacts in Cullman and St. Clair counties had practically dissipated.14
The CFWU was eventually launched in Tallapoosa County, a section of the eastern piedmont whose varied topography ranges from the hill country of Appalachia in the north to the coastal-like plains and pine forests of the south. In 1930, almost 70 percent of those engaged in agriculture were either tenants or wage workers, the majority of whom were sharecroppers. Blacks comprised the bulk of the county's tenant and rural laboring population, and while they constituted roughly one-third of the total population, most blacks resided in the flat, fertile southeastern and southwestern sections of the county. As in the black belt counties further south, antebellum planter families in these two areas retained political and economic ascendancy, despite competition from textile and sawmill interests. Not surprisingly, the impetus to build a union came from local tenant farmers living primarily in southeastern Tallapoosa County. Estelle Milner, a young school teacher and the daughter of a black Tallapoosa sharecropper, was instrumental in establishing links between black farmers and Communist leaders in Birmingham. She laid the groundwork for the Party's activities by secretly distributing the Southern Worker and placing leaflets in strategic areas. Two brothers, Tommy and Ralph Gray, contacted the Party, persuaded several local sharecroppers to send letters to the Southern Worker, and in early spring invited a Communist organizer to help them build a union.15
The Grays were known by their neighbors as a proud family with a militant heritage. Their grandfather Alfred Gray had been a state legislator in Perry County, Alabama, during Reconstruction and a staunch advocate of equal rights as well as a sharp critic of the Freedmen's Bureau. He told a mixed crowd in Uniontown in 1868, “I am not afraid to fight for [the Constitution], and I will fight for it until hell freezes over. ... I may go to hell, my home is hell, but the white man shall go there with me.”16 Ralph Gray, who had been nourished on stories of his grandfather, emerged as the fledgling movement's undisputed local leader. One of fifteen children, Gray was born in Tallapoosa County in 1873 and spent about one year of his adult life working in Birmingham. After returning to Tallapoosa in 1895, he married and settled down as a tenant farmer until 1919, when he and his family left Alabama in search of better opportunities. Having spent some time sharecropping in Oklahoma and New Mexico, he returned to the place of his birth in 1929 and purchased a small farm. Gray owned a plot of land but it was hardly enough to survive on. Nevertheless, he managed to remain debt-free and purchased his own automobile, thus earning the respect of his local community. Early in 1931 Gray applied for a low-interest federal loan with which to rent a farm from Tallapoosa merchant John J. Langley. Because the loan check required a double endorsement, Langley was able to cash the check and withhold Gray's portion, who then retaliated by filing a complaint with the Agricultural Extension Service. “When the landlord heard what he had done,” his brother Tommy recalled, “he got mighty mad and jumped on Brother Ralph to give him a whipping. Instead Brother Ralph whipped him.” Soon thereafter, Ralph began reading the Southern Worker, joined the Communist Party, and set out with his brother to build a union.17
Gray's fight with Langley suggests a growing tension between landlord and tenant, merchant and landowner, each operating in a system more precarious than ever. As conditions deteriorated, the Southern Worker's appeal for collective action became an increasingly attractive alternative to starvation and isolated instances of protest. In April, the Grays’ request for an organizer was filled by Mack Coad, an illiterate Birmingham steel worker originally from Charleston, South Carolina, who had joined the Party in 1930. Following an unsuccessful bid for municipal judge in Chattanooga under the Communist ticket, he returned to Birmingham in March 1931 for a three- or four-week hiatus and then left for Tallapoosa County as “Jim Wright,” secretary of the CFWU.18
Coad arrived at the height of an important crisis in rural Tallapoosa. Soon after the cotton had been planted and chopped, several landlords withdrew all cash and food advances in a calculated effort to generate labor for the newly built Russell Saw Mill. The mill paid exactly the same wage for unskilled labor as the going rate for cotton chopping—fifty cents per day for men and twenty-five cents a day for women. By mid-May the Southern Worker reported significant union gains in Tallapoosa County and announced that black sawmill workers and farmers in the vicinity “have enthusiastically welcomed Communist leadership.” The nascent movement formulated seven basic demands, the most crucial being the continuation of food advances. The right of sharecroppers to market their own crops was also a critical issue because landlords usually gave their tenants the year's lowest price for their cotton and held on to the bales until the price increased, thus denying the producer the full benefits of the crop. Union leaders also demanded small gardens for resident wage hands, cash rather than wages in kind, a minimum wage of one dollar per day, and a three-hour midday rest for all laborers—all of which were to be applied equally, irrespective of race, age, or sex. Furthermore, they agitated for a nine-month school year for black children and free transportation to and from school.19
By July 1931 the CFWU, now eight hundred strong, had won a few isolated victories in its battle for the continuation of food advances.20 Most Tallapoosa landlords, however, just would not tolerate a surreptitious organization of black tenant farmers and agricultural workers. Camp Hill, Alabama, became the scene of the union's first major confrontation with the local power structure. On July 15, Taft Holmes organized a group of sharecroppers near Camp Hill and invited Coad, along with several other union members, to address the group in a vacant house that doubled as a church. In all, about eighty black men and women piled into the abandoned house to listen to Coad discuss the CFWU and the Scottsboro case. After a black informant notified Tallapoosa County sheriff Kyle Young of the gathering, deputized vigilantes raided the meeting place, brutally beating men and women alike. The posse then regrouped at Tommy Gray's home and assaulted his entire family, including his wife who suffered a fractured skull, in an effort to obtain information about the CFWU. Only an agitated Ralph Gray, who had rushed into the house armed, saved them from possible fatal consequences. Union organizer Jasper Kennedy was arrested for possessing twenty copies of the Southern Worker, and Holmes was picked up by police the following day, interrogated for several hours, and upon release fled to Chattanooga.21
Despite the violence, about 150 sharecroppers met with Coad the following evening in a vacant house southwest of Camp Hill. This time sentries were posted around the meeting place. When Sheriff Young arrived on the scene with Camp Hill police chief J. M. Wilson and Deputy A. J. Thompson, he found Ralph Gray standing guard about a quarter-mile from the meeting. Although accounts differ as to the sequence of events, both Gray and the sheriff traded harsh words and, in the heat of argument, exchanged buckshot. Young, who received gunshot wounds to the stomach, was rushed to a hospital in nearby Alexander City while Gray lay on the side of the road, his legs riddled with bullets. Fellow union members carried Gray to his home where the group, including Mack Coad, barricaded themselves inside the house. The group held off a posse led by police chief J. M. Wilson long enough to allow most members to escape, but the wounded Ralph Gray opted to remain in his home until the end.22 The posse returned with reinforcements and found Gray lying in his bed and his family huddled in a corner. According to his brother, someone in the group “poked a pistol into Brother Ralph's mouth and shot down his throat.” The mob burned his home to the ground and dumped his body on the steps of the Dadeville courthouse. The mangled and lifeless leader became an example for other black sharecroppers as groups of armed whites took turns shooting and kicking the bloody corpse of Ralph Gray.23
Over the next few days, between thirty-four and fifty-five black men were arrested near Camp Hill, nine of whom were under eighteen years of age.24 Most of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to murder or with carrying a concealed weapon, but five union members, Dosie Miner, T. Patterson, William Gribb, John Finch, and Tommy Finch, were charged with assault to murder. Although police chief Wilson could not legally act out his wish to “kill every member of the ‘Reds’ there and throw them into the creek,” the Camp Hill police department stood idle as enraged white citizens waged genocidal attacks on the black community that left dozens wounded or dead and forced entire families to seek refuge in the woods. Union secretary Mack Coad, the vigilantes’ prime target, fled all the way to Atlanta. But few Tallapoosa Communists were as lucky as Coad. Estelle Milner suffered a fractured vertebra at the hands of police after a local black minister accused her of possessing ammunition.25
Behind the violence in Tallapoosa County loomed the Scottsboro case. William G. Porter, secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, observed that vigilantes in and around Camp Hill were “trying to get even for Scottsboro.”26 Rumors spread throughout the county that armed bands of blacks were roaming the countryside searching for landlords to murder and white women to rape. On July 18, for example, the Birmingham Age-Herald carried a story headlined “Negro Reds Reported Advancing” claiming that eight carloads of black Communists were on their way from Chattanooga to assist the Tallapoosa sharecroppers. In response, about 150 white men established a roadblock on the main highway north of the county only to meet a funeral procession from Sylacauga, Alabama, en route to a graveyard just north of Dadeville.27
Outraged middle-class black leaders, clergymen, and white liberals blamed white Communists for the incident, asserting that armed resistance on the part of black sharecroppers and tenants was unnatural. An investigation conducted by James D. Burton, Tennessee secretary for the CIC found “irresponsible white groups” to be the cause of the conflict, although illiteracy and poverty explained why black sharecroppers were “easily influenced by agitators, and easily misled in trying to find their way out of their difficulties.” Ralph Gray, the one homegrown anomaly, was deemed an exception because he presumably returned from Oklahoma and New Mexico “with radical ideas.”28
Hoping to quell black unrest in the area, Robert Russa Moton, superintendent of Tuskegee Institute, dispatched representatives to Tallapoosa in a calculated move to turn blacks away from Communism. Likewise, L. N. Duncan, director of the Agricultural Extension Service based at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, assured Governor Miller that several black county agents were “making a special effort to quiet the people down, urging them to put away their guns and calling their attention to the fact that they are badly mislead [sic] by these communistic representatives.” The NAACP also made its presence felt, particularly after local authorities tried to implicate the association with the allegation that seized CFWU minute books belonged to “the Society for the Advancement of Colored People.” Walter White and local Birmingham NAACP leaders sharply denied any connection to the Communist-led union and accused the Party of using the NAACP's good name to mislead black sharecroppers.29
While publicly admonishing the Communists for Camp Hill, Walter White quietly pursued the idea of providing legal defense for the jailed sharecroppers. He feared that if the ILD entered the case and won an acquittal, the Communists would “proclaim loudly that ‘mass Action’ had freed the Camp Hill defendants,” thus validating the ILD's legal defense strategies. But unlike Scottsboro, the Camp Hill defendants were members of the Party's organization; there was no question as to who was going to defend them. Governor Miller and the Dadeville sheriff's office received a flurry of telegrams and postcards protesting the arrests and demanding the death penalty for all those directly involved in the murder of Ralph Gray. The ILD further linked this case-to the Scottsboro trial, focusing on the exclusion of blacks from Southern juries. Irving Schwab, an attorney for the Scottsboro defendants, secured the release of all but seven of the imprisoned sharecroppers because of insufficient evidence, and the remaining seven defendants were later released after their hearings were postponed indefinitely. Prominent Alabama citizens wary of creating another Scottsboro episode pressured authorities to quietly drop the case.30
National Communist leadership praised the union's resistance at Camp Hill as vindication of the Party's slogan calling for the right of self-determination. The ILD's defense of the sharecroppers was further proof, they reasoned, of the effectiveness of mass pressure outside the courtroom. But union organizers found little romance in the bloodletting or in the uprooting of hundreds of poor black farmers that had followed the Camp Hill battle. Moreover, rural conditions in Tallapoosa County had not improved at all. By September, the height of the cotton picking season, landlords again promised to cut off all food and cash advances after the cotton was picked, and many tenants had to pick cotton on other plantations in order to earn enough to survive the winter. The going rate at the time was a meager thirty cents per one hundred pounds, a tiny sum considering the average laborer could only pick about two hundred pounds per day.31
The repression and the deteriorating economic conditions stunted the union's growth initially, but the lessons of Camp Hill also provided a stimulus for a new type of movement, reborn from the ashes of the old. On August 6, 1931, the fifty-five remaining CFWU members regrouped as the SCU and reconstituted five locals in Tallapoosa County.32
Throughout 1931 the SCU existed without an organizational secretary. Between August 1931 and early 1932, the SCU's only direct link to the Party was a nineteen-year-old YCL organizer from Springfield, Massachusetts, named Harry Hirsch, who adopted the pseudonym “Harry Simms.” Simms's role was that of liaison, intermittently carrying information back and forth between district leaders and the SCU locals, which now began to operate with virtually no CP direction. As Simms observed, they were meeting every week in small groups and “carrying on the work on their own initiative even [though] we have not sent an organizer down there.”33
Tommy Gray continued to organize, but because he was targeted by landlords and local authorities, escaping at least one attempted assassination, it was difficult for him to maneuver. Instead, Gray's daughter, nineteen-year-old YCL leader Eula Gray, held the movement together during this very critical period. When Simms left for Kentucky in 1931, Eula Gray assumed his role as liaison and served as ad hoc secretary until May 1932. By the time she left the post, the SCU in Tallapoosa County had grown to 591 members organized in twenty-eight locals, ten youth groups, and twelve women's auxiliaries; sixty-seven members were organized in nine Lee County locals, four of which were based in the town of Notasulga. Chambers and Macon counties each reported thirty members. As district bureau member Harry Wicks observed, “The croppers themselves are maintaining their organization and reports are that they are holding meetings regularly without any direction from us, except what this little girl [Eula Gray] can impart to them.”34
That Wicks could refer to a nineteen-year-old woman as a “little girl” illustrates his underestimation of female leadership, an attitude likely shared by other bureau members. Ignoring Gray's proven ability and her Tallapoosa roots, district organizer Nat Ross appointed twenty-five-year-old Al Murphy to the position of SCU secretary.35 What would have become of the SCU if Gray continued as secretary, we will never know. However, Al Murphy proved to be a tremendous asset to the fledgling organization. Recognizing the need to expand beyond the eastern piedmont counties into the black belt, Murphy eventually established headquarters in Montgomery where he worked closely with that city's three leading black Communists: Charles Tasker, the leader of the Montgomery Unemployed Councils; his wife, Capitola Tasker, who directed the SCU Women's Auxiliaries; and Montgomery Party leader John Beans. Beans was unique in that he was the only black veteran trade union organizer in the Alabama Communist Party, having served as vice-president of the ASFL in 1902.36
With Murphy in charge, white CP leaders stopped calling on black sharecroppers to “demonstrate in front of the landlord's house [and demand] that the food advances be continued until the crop is taken in.” Besides, local blacks had never taken these suicidal directives seriously. Murphy was well aware of the croppers’ underground tradition of resistance, and he developed tactics that emphasized self-preservation and cunning. No meetings were to be held in empty houses; SCU members were not to walk in large crowds; and they were not to engage in armed action without notifying Murphy, unless, of course, it could not be avoided. Everything from their actions to their demeanor drew on subterranean forms of everyday resistance. Ned Cobb, a small landowner from Tallapoosa County who joined the SCU in 1932, was told “to act humble, be straight; his teachin, to not go at a thing too rapid and forcible. Be quiet, whatever we do, let it work in a way of virtue.” Yet, Murphy's instructions to “act humble” did not mean abandoning armed self-defense. Members such as Lemon Johnson, former secretary of the Hope Hull local, believed armed self-defense distinguished the SCU from other organizations. His own experience informed him that “the only thing going to stop them from killing you, you got to go shooting.” When Harry Haywood attended an SCU meeting in Dadeville, he was taken aback by what he described as “a small arsenal.” “There were guns,” he recalled, “of all kinds—shotguns, rifles and pistols. Sharecroppers were coming to the meeting armed and left their guns with their coats when they came in.”37
Lemon Johnson, SCU secretary of Hope Hull, Alabama, local, photographed in 1986 (photograph by author)
Murphy decentralized the organization by establishing captains for each local, and like Harry Simms and Eula Gray before him, he kept the locals informed of the situation in other counties. Dues were collected when possible, but most of the funds, never amounting to more than a few cents, were in the hands of the captains. They tended to the day-to-day organizing of the union, the women's auxiliaries, and the youth sections, and those who could write were responsible for sending articles to the Party's press detailing conditions in their respective areas. Murphy warned the captains against becoming tyrannical or egocentric with their power. “No captain is to act as a boss of his local,” he frequently advised. Weekly meetings were supposed to be held, always in absolute secrecy to avoid police raids or vigilante attacks. Minutes were rarely kept because of the potential danger of keeping written records, not to mention the problem of literacy in the black belt. Union locals often cloaked their intentions by holding Bible meetings, and some secretaries recorded the minutes by underlining pertinent words or phrases in the Bible.38
Black women's contribution to the SCU rarely appeared in the pages of the Party press, in part because their strong presence countered an essentially male-centered version of radicalism generated by Communist writers and national leaders, most of whom had never worked in the South. Indeed, the Party's advocacy of black self-determination conjured up masculine historical figures such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner, and writers like Eugene Gordon and V. J. Jerome portrayed the movement as a struggle for manhood. Armed resistance, in particular, was deemed a masculine activity. When the central black character, a young Southern-born Communist, in Grace Lumpkin's novel A Sign for Cain observed “shot guns stacked in the corner of the cabin,” he assured his comrades, “we ain't dealing with cowards, but men.” For nearly all writers in Communist circles—black and white, male and female—the martyred Ralph Gray assumed the symbol of black manhood in the South. Radical poet Ruby Weems published a moving account of “The Murder of Ralph Gray,” the final stanza closing the episode with a great climactic vision:
His muscles swelling into a mighty challenge,
Mount into a vision of a million clenched fists.
He wears his death like a joyous banner of solidarity,
A sceptre of militant Negro manhood.
He lies still and silent—but under his unmoving form
Rise hosts of dark, strong men,
The vast army of rebellion!
When leading Communist theoretician V. J. Jerome introduced his famous poem, “To a Black Man,” he referred to the “slaughtered blood of Ralph Gray / black skinned share-cropper of Camp Hill.”39
These ideological constructions distorted black women's role in the SCU—women whose indispensable organizing skills and basic concerns were the foundation of union activity. The tradition of autonomous black women's religious and social organizations served as conduits for the broader movement and were prototypes for the women's auxiliaries. Frequently called “Sewing Clubs,” the women's auxiliaries exercised considerable power within the union. Although they met separately to divert the suspicions of local authorities and, according to observers, “so one parent can stay with children when the other is away,” the Sewing Clubs provided forums to discuss conditions and formulate strategy. These women read the Daily Worker, the Southern Worker, and Working Woman when they could get it, and generated a stream of correspondence that linked their local struggles with the national and international movement. Union wives or girls with a modicum of formal education wrote brief descriptive letters to the Party's daily and regional tabloids. Usually the result of collective discussion within the union locals, the letters were “often scribbled on a piece of sack or crumpled wrapping paper.”40
These letters seem to support the contention that women's assigned role in the sexual division of labor, in this case motherhood, lay at the root of women's collective action and radicalization—a manifestation of “female consciousness.”41 A common theme that runs through most of these letters, as well as speeches by black female Communists, is the overall inability of women to feed and care for their families under intolerable conditions. A Tallapoosa County YCL organizer expressed the sentiments of her comrades: “We are tired of seeing our children go naked and hungry, crying for bread. . . . We must raise our voices louder against this. Not only I myself am suffering, but millions of mothers and children are suffering.” Speaking before the Women's Congress against War and Fascism in Paris, Capitola Tasker acknowledged that she joined the movement “for the benefit of the children now living and the children who are to come.”42
Women's radicalization through “female consciousness” does not tell us the whole story, however. Party rhetoric at the national level tended to overemphasize the family economy and the oppression of women as mothers because Communists constructed a vision of working-class militancy that generally excluded women and thus tended to overshadow the struggles of women without children or whose children were grown.43 But women joined the SCU as workers and farmers seeking equal wages and better conditions. As a political movement that encouraged women's involvement, at least in rhetoric, the SCU also served as a lever of power since outright repression of women's participation could lead to charges of “male chauvinism”—an imported phrase that entered some black women's vocabulary via Working Woman and other CP tabloids. Finally, union and auxiliary meetings provided a needed respite from daily chores and freed women from child care since men were expected to take up the slack during Sewing Club meetings.
Murphy, an unflinching supporter of the Party's demand for self-determination in the black belt, had very definite ideas about the radical character of the SCU. He saw within each and every member “standard bearers of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Frederick Douglass,” and regarded the all-black movement as the very embodiment of black self-determination. Nonetheless, the SCU received some tacit support from poor white farmers. Once in a while sympathetic poor white tenant farmers, especially women, attended SCU meetings. In Lemon Johnson's words, most white tenant farmers “wanted this color line broke down better than us do. . . . Some of them be with us in the meetings, the white women. And some of these white men from out here be with us in the meeting, help bringing this thing down. Be telling us some things that half the people crying on to God.” Some poor whites were obviously attracted to the SCU's program, but racial divisions in the black belt were drawn so sharply that black organizers felt it was too dangerous to even discuss the union with whites. “I'd like to see [whites] come along with us,” admitted one SCU member, “but I ain't gonna go out and ask them. That's too dangerous.” Some whites paid a dear price for their sympathy. In 1934, white Tallapoosa tenant farmer J. W. Davis was kidnapped and lynched by vigilantes because of his support for the SCU.44
Open membership was impossible but poor whites showed their support in a variety of ways, from providing food and supplies to known union members to hiding activists during crises.45 Perhaps the most common form of support that allowed individuals to retain their anonymity was voting. In Elmore County, an SCU stronghold, 275 votes were cast for William Z. Foster and James Ford in the 1932 presidential election. (Herbert Hoover only received 160 votes from Elmore county!) This is an astounding figure when one considers that the all-white electorate was comprised of only 3,641 voters. Overall, 49 percent of the state's Communist vote in 1932 came from Elmore, Crenshaw (54 votes), and Perry (33 votes)—counties in which the SCU was active. The Communists’ surprising showing in Elmore, however, might also reflect white farmers’ disillusionment with the two-party system. As one frustrated mainstream Democrat declared in 1932, Elmore voters “are uncertain about what to do or what they want to do; their minds are not normal.”46
Support was also forthcoming from a small group of white liberals in Montgomery who had formed a Marxist study group during the 1930s. Composed of “some of the most prominent and richest people in Montgomery,” the largely female group included teachers, social workers, and wives of upper-middle-class Jews interested in world peace and domestic social reforms. Most prominent were Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein, who was regarded by his congregation at Temple Beth Or as somewhat of an iconoclast, and Olive Stone, a professor of Sociology and dean at Montevallo College, who had traveled to the USSR in the 1920s. Apparently, no one in the group joined the Communist Party, but they provided crucial financial and moral support for Communist activities in Birmingham, Montgomery, and the cotton belt. Olive Stone, for example, secretly made occasional donations of $50 to $100 to the SCU.47
After a year of rebuilding following Camp Hill, the union emerged stronger than ever. A threatened pickers’ strike in 1932 won union members on at least one Tallapoosa plantation the right to sell their own cotton directly as well as a continuation of winter food advances. Days after the victory was announced, organizer Luther Hughley was arrested for vagrancy, but soon after he was placed in police custody, he was accused of kidnapping a white woman from Camp Hill. Before a mass campaign could be initiated, however, Hughley was released and threatened with rope and faggot if he did not leave the county.48 Aside from Hughley's arrest and the aborted pickers’ strike, Camp Hill remained rather quiet and uneventful after the cotton had been picked. While most farmers prepared for the coming winter, five SCU organizers joined Al Murphy as delegates to the National Farmers’ Relief Conference in Washington, D.C., in December.49 The peace did not last very long. Exactly two weeks after the delegation left Alabama for the conference, the SCU in Tallapoosa County once again found itself embroiled in an explosive battle with local authorities.
It all started near Reeltown, an area about fifteen miles southwest of Camp Hill. The SCU's armed stand centered around a landlord's attempt to seize the property of Clifford James, a debt-ridden farmer who had been struggling desperately to purchase the land he worked. The story actually dates back to 1926, when James borrowed $950 to purchase the seventy-seven-acre plot he was working from Notasulga merchant W. S. Parker. The full cost of the land was $1,500. In addition to the borrowed money, James paid $250 in cash and sold $450 worth of timber from his property. Parker then absorbed James's debt by taking out a mortgage on the land. After advancing James money, food, and implements in 1927, Parker sold him three mules on credit, which then augmented James's debt to $1,500. James's friend and fellow SCU member, Ned Cobb, was also indebted to Parker. “[Parker] had it in for me,” Cobb recalled. “He knew I had good stock and I was a good worker and all like that. He just aimed to use his power to break me down; he'd been doin to people that way before then.”50
When the SCU reorganized in Tallapoosa County, its approach to debt peonage attracted James and hundreds of other black farmers. As a result of debates within the Communist Party's National Negro Commission, the SCU added to its core program the abolition of all debts owed by poor farmers and tenants, as well as interest charged on necessary items such as food, clothes, and seed. The SCU's solution to indebtedness had appealed to so many black tenants and small landowners that even W. S. Parker felt the union's policies damaged relations between him and his tenants. “The reaction among James and several other Negroes,” Parker admitted, “who before had shown a spirit of cooperation to the mentioning of foreclosures, seemed to point conclusively that there was some sort of sinister influence at work among them.” James threw himself into the movement, becoming a Communist and a leader of an SCU local that included farmers from Reeltown and Lee County.51
Parker blamed this “sinister influence” for his inability to reach an agreement with James concerning his debts. Unable to come to terms, Parker asked Deputy Sheriff Cliff Elder to serve a writ of attachment on James's livestock. When Elder arrived on December 19, 1932, about fifteen armed SCU members were already standing outside James's home prepared to resist or avert the seizure. Although the group challenged established property rights by protecting James's right to retain his livestock in contravention of the law, they tried to avoid a gun battle. Their collective stand differed from the individualized practice of hiding vulnerable items, but the first stages of confrontation remained clearly within the traditional boundaries of rural paternalism. Ned Cobb humbly pleaded with Elder: “Please sir, don't take it. Go to the ones that authorized you to take his stuff, if you please, sir, and tell em to give him a chance. He'll work to pay what he owes em.” When Elder and his black assistant officer attempted to seize the animals, humility ceased. James and Cobb warned them against taking the animals, and Elder interpreted their warnings as death threats. Fearing for his life, he left James's farm, promising to return to “kill you niggers in a pile.”52
Elder returned a few hours later with three reinforcements—Chief Deputy Dowdle Ware, former sheriff J. M. Gaunt, and a local landlord named J. H. Alfred. Several SCU members barricaded themselves in James's home and others stood poised at the barn. Shots were exchanged almost as soon as the four men stepped onto the property, but when Elder's small posse “seed that crowd of niggers at the barn throw up their guns they jumped in the car” and fled from the vicinity. Unable to persuade Governor Miller to dispatch state troops, Sheriff Young proceeded to form his own posse, gathering men from Lee, Macon, Elmore, and Montgomery counties to scour the area for suspected SCU members.53
When the shoot-out was over, SCU member John McMullen lay dead, and several others were wounded, including Clifford James, Milo Bentley, Thomas Moss, and Ned Cobb. Within the next few days, at least twenty union members were rounded up and thrown in jail.54 Several of those arrested were not involved in the shoot-out, but their names were discovered when the police returned to James's home and uncovered the SCU local's membership list along with “considerable Communistic literature.” The violence that followed eclipsed the Camp Hill affair of 1931. Entire families were forced to take refuge in the woods; white vigilante groups broke into black homes and seized guns, ammunition, and other property; and blacks were warned that if they appeared in the Liberty Hill section of Reeltown they would be shot on sight. A blind black woman reported to be nearly one hundred years old was severely beaten and pistol whipped by a group of vigilantes, and one Tallapoosa doctor claimed to have treated at least a dozen black patients with gunshot wounds.55
Despite severe injuries to his back, James managed to walk seventeen miles to Tuskegee Institute's hospital. After dressing James's gunshot wounds, Dr. Eugene Dibble of Tuskegee contacted the Macon County sheriff, who then removed James to a cold, damp cell at the Montgomery County jail. Milo Bentley, who reportedly had been shot in the head, back, and arms, was also taken to Montgomery County jail. Observers claimed that Bentley and James received no medical treatment from their jailers and both were found “lying on filthy and flimsy blankets on the floor. Cliff James was lying naked on the floor in a separate cage, delirious from the loss of blood and with blood-soaked dirty dressings over those wounds which had been dressed.” On December 27, James died from infected wounds and pneumonia, both caused by the lack of medical treatment. Ten and one-half hours later, Bentley's lifeless body was found in the same condition.56
About four or five days after the shoot-out, the ILD and the SCU in Tallapoosa County held a mass meeting in Camp Hill and elected a committee of fifteen to investigate the arrests. The ILD sent attorneys Irving Schwab and George Chamlee to Montgomery on behalf of the imprisoned black farmers, but because jail authorities denied ILD representatives access to the prisoners, they had very little information with which to prepare a case. The ILD faced other unforeseen obstacles. Its Birmingham office was ransacked by police, or vigilantes masquerading as law officers, and within hours police arrested several Communist organizers. Despite these setbacks, the ILD held a very successful public meeting at the Old Pythian Temple on January 2, 1933, to protest the arrests and to censure Robert Moton and staff members at Tuskegee Institute for their complicity in the deaths of James and Bentley. A few days later, a mass funeral was held for the two martyred union organizers. Pall bearers carrying two caskets draped with banners emblazoned with deep red hammers and sickles led a procession of three thousand people, most of whom were black. The mourners marched six miles through Birmingham to Grace Hills Cemetery on the southern side of the city, cordoned by an additional one thousand people who crowded the sidewalks along the route of the procession.57
As more detailed accounts of the shoot-out reached the press, Tuskegee Institute increasingly became a target of criticism. An elderly Alabama black woman, Abbie Elmore Bugg, castigated Moton personally. “Now, if you love your neighbor as yourself,” she asked, “why did you not protect those two poor wounded negro farmers? Why did you let them die? A good enimy [sic] of all races I should say you be, in a time of real need.” William McArthur from Detroit charged Moton and his staff “with the murder of [Milo] Bentley and Cliff James.” “You so-called Negro leaders,” he continued, “are Nothing but a bunch of traitors. Dirty reformis [sic] Bootlicking helping the Landlord robbers take the Negro Farmers Cotton and land [and] Other Products from them.” Although Moton believed all the attacks directed at him and the institute were Communist-inspired, he refrained from blaming the Communists for Reeltown. “The recent outbreaks of violence,” he explained to one inquirer, “between whites and Negroes in that County are primarily the results of the prevailing tenant system in the South that has long since outlived its usefulness.” Yet, while the institute was sensitive to black farmers’ needs, it rejected unionization as a strategy for change. Tuskegee's statistician and expert on rural affairs, Monroe Work, admitted that the institute's “general policy... is to discourage the organization of Negro Farmers.”58
Like the Camp Hill shoot-out in 1931, white liberals and the Southern press blamed Communists for the Reeltown incident. Although a Birmingham Post editorial dissented from other newspapers by discussing the indigenous economic roots of the conflict, the writer still placed considerable blame on Party propaganda and black inferiority: “It is the ignorance of the negro which makes him prey to the incendiary literature with which the mail boxes of both white and negro farmers of Tallapoosa County have been stuffed. It is this literature which transforms him from a law abiding citizen into one who defies the law. . . . The average negro in his normal state of mind does not consider firing on officers seeking to carry out the law.”59
Many black middle-class leaders agreed that the menace of Communism lurked behind the events at Reeltown. The Atlanta Daily World advised blacks to ignore the Communists and instead to “battle for our rights legally in the courts, and economically through mass-owned businesses.” But the black elite was not in complete accord. The Reverend M. Nunn, a black Tallapoosa minister, admitted that he had little support from established black leaders for his campaign against the SCU. As he put it, “I am the only Negro that I know of, working every day with the Officers in locating these [Communist] Units in this Section of Alabama.” Some respected middle-class blacks even offered support for the union. At the height of the crisis, one relatively wealthy black landlord let Al Murphy hide on his farm and use his barn as an office to produce SCU leaflets.60
The trial of the SCU members illustrates the extent of the union's popularity in the eastern piedmont. So many black sharecroppers crowded into the courtroom that Solicitor Sam W. Oliver decided to postpone the trial until the excitement subsided. When proceedings resumed in late April, county officials set up roadblocks outside Dadeville to discourage blacks from attending. Nevertheless, black farmers evaded the roadblocks by traveling through gullies and back roads and filled the courtroom once again. The all-white jury convicted five of the nineteen SCU members indicted for assault with a deadly weapon. Ned Cobb was given twelve to fifteen years; Clinton Moss and Alf White received ten years each; Judson Simpson was sentenced to a maximum of twelve years; and Sam Moss was given five to six years.61
The confrontation at Reeltown apparently did not discourage the union's recruitment efforts. By June 1933, Al Murphy reported a membership of nearly 2,000 organized in 73 locals, 80 women's auxiliaries, and 20 youth groups. New locals were formed in Dale and Randolph counties and in the border town of West Point, Georgia. The Communists also established 5 additional rural Party units, each composed of 30 to 35 members.62 In other parts of the rural South, those who stood their ground at Reeltown were celebrated in rural folklore, as exemplified in the following verses composed just a few months after the incident and sung by sharecroppers in Rock Hill, South Carolina:
What you gwine do nigger, wit’ the power dat's in yo’ ahm?
Git wipin’ yo eye tear, ‘till de strenff is dead an’ gone?
Bowed down on yo’ knees, ‘till turkey buzzard git through wit’ you?
Wa’ cher gwine do nigger, ain’ nothin’ lak what ah said
Do lak Alabamy boys an’ win or be foun’ dead.63
National Communist leaders regarded the SCU as the finest contemporary example of black revolutionary traditions. The apparent militancy of the burgeoning movement was the proof Communist theoreticians needed to justify the slogan demanding self-determination in the black belt. But the union's rank-and-file, who had little time to theorize about the changes taking place in the rural South, found little to celebrate. Black farmers were organizing primarily for their own survival and for a greater share in the decaying system of cotton tenancy. They might have won the battle to exist, but by late 1933 the SCU faced an additional set of problems when the federal government decided to intervene in the production process.
Congress and President Roosevelt attempted to reinvigorate the country's dying cotton economy with the AAA. Conceived in 1933 as an emergency measure, the AAA was supposed to increase the purchasing power of landowning farmers by subsidizing acreage reduction. A year later the Cotton Control Act and the Gin Tax Act, both sponsored by Alabama senator John Bankhead, made cotton reduction programs compulsory and added a mandatory tax on the ginning of all cotton above the specified quota. Southern sharecroppers were supposed to receive one-ninth of the 1934–35 benefit checks, but in most cases they received nothing since local planters controlled distribution of parity payments. Moreover, landlords used the Gin Tax Act as a lever to obtain their tenants’ cotton. In order to gin cotton without paying the tax, tenants had to obtain gin certificates from their landlords or from local planter-dominated AAA boards. If a tenant refused to give the cotton to his or her landlord to be ginned, the landlord would withhold the gin certificate until cotton prices dropped.64
At first such abuses were commonplace, and a liberal section of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration tried to restructure the distribution process. However, most planters did not have to engage in fraud in order to benefit from New Deal policies. They merely reallocated land, evicted redundant tenants, and applied the cash subsidies to wages rather than sharing it with their tenants. New Deal policies, therefore, indirectly stimulated a structural change in the cotton economy—the mechanization of agriculture. Cotton production remained unmechanized for so long partly because most landlords lacked capital and because the units of production—plots farmed by tenants and sharecroppers—were too small to warrant adoption of expensive technology. Tenancy provided the cheap labor needed to make the transition to mechanization, but it limited production to small, segmented units. By farming larger units of production, landlords could apply the parity payments and savings derived from not furnishing tenants to tractors, fertilizers, and other implements needed for large-scale cotton farming. Local relief administrators helped the landlords by clearing the relief rolls during cotton picking and cotton chopping seasons, thus ensuring an abundant supply of cheap labor.65
As large portions of the 1933 crop were being plowed under and the first wave of tenants was being evicted, the SCU called strikes on several cotton plantations in Chambers and Lee counties and demanded fifty cents per one hundred pounds. The union's first attempted strike since its founding three years earlier crumbled, however, when seven SCU leaders were arrested and posses forced pickers back into the fields. Although the strike failed, thousands of evicted tenants in Alabama began turning to the SCU for assistance. By March 1934, the union claimed 6,000 members and established locals in the black belt counties of Lowndes, Macon, Montgomery, and Dallas. The SCU's sudden growth in the black belt prompted Murphy to move the underground headquarters from Birmingham to Montgomery. The proliferation of black belt locals was directly linked to mass evictions and landlord abuses stemming from the AAA. As Murphy pointed out, nearly half of the SCU's membership was recruited between July 1933 and April 1934. According to one SCU leader in Camp Hill, because of the AAA, the union “is taking on new life. . . . The SCU in places where [it] has been slack [is] beginning to wake up and people don't wait for the comrades to come as they used to.”66
The SCU adopted a variety of methods to deal with landlords’ abuses of the parity program. First, because hundreds of evicted tenants and sharecroppers were simultaneously removed from relief rolls and CWA projects so that cheap wage labor would be available for cotton chopping, union organizers fought for immediate relief and tried to persuade federal authorities to investigate local CWA administrators. In February 1934, a group of black women organized a “Committee of Action,” marched down to the CWA office in Camp Hill, and eventually won partial demands for relief. Tenants and sharecroppers who had not yet been evicted were instructed not to sign the joint parity checks unless the landlords paid their portion in cash rather than use the funds to settle debts. SCU members often refused to give up their rental share of cotton unless they received their portion of the AAA check. The union also convinced some day laborers and cotton pickers to boycott plantations that were considered “vicious in their treatment of tenants and sharecroppers.” On one plantation in Chambers County, a boycott of this kind led to the arrests of eleven union members.67
Late that summer the SCU prepared for another cotton pickers’ strike in Lee and Tallapoosa counties. With a demand of one dollar per hundred pounds, the strike started in mid-September on B. W. Meadows's plantation in Tallapoosa County and soon spread to several large plantations in both counties, involving between seven hundred and one thousand pickers. The landlords’ first response was to evict the strikers, but because it was the height of the cotton picking season, planters needed all available labor. With the support of local police, the planters turned to force to break the strike. In Lee County, police arrested seven union members for distributing strike leaflets, and in Tallapoosa vigilantes shot at least three strikers, including a woman Party organizer. Pinned to the doors of several suspected strikers’ homes was the following message: “WARNING, TAKE NOTICE. If you want to do well and have a healthy life you better leave the Share Croppers’ Union.” Hooded night riders in Lee County kidnapped and beat SCU organizer Comit Talbert, and later in the evening two more Lee County sharecroppers were kidnapped, draped in chains, and taken to a nearby swamp where vigilantes threatened to drown them if they remained in the union. The local sheriff intervened but arrested the shackled black sharecroppers and held them on charges of attempted murder.68
The Alabama Relief Administration also played a crucial role in undermining the strike. As soon as the SCU announced plans for a cotton pickers’ strike, Thad Holt, director of the state relief administration, dropped from the relief rolls all “able bodied” workers who did not volunteer to pick cotton for wages. Even the state reemployment agency in Birmingham relocated several people with “farm experience” to the cotton fields.69
In spite of repression, mass evictions, and the expanded pool of cheap labor, the SCU claimed some substantial victories. On most of the plantations affected, the union won at least seventy-five cents per one hundred pounds, and in areas not affected by the strike, landlords reportedly increased wages from thirty-five cents per hundred pounds to fifty cents or more in order to avert the spread of the strike. On Howard Graves's plantation, located on the border of Lee and Tallapoosa counties, union members not only won the sought-after one dollar per hundred pounds, but they forced Graves to raise monthly credit allowances from ten to fifteen dollars. Finally, the SCU claimed a small victory on General C. L. Pearson's plantation when about one thousand sharecroppers and tenants refused to gin their cotton at Pearson's gin. By taking their cotton to an independent gin in Dadeville, they saved money and prevented Pearson from seizing their cotton to cover past debts.70
The 1934 cotton pickers’ strike marked the SCU's first major victory since its birth three years earlier. As tales of the union's stand in Tallapoosa County spread from cabin to cabin, so did the union's popularity; by October, Murphy reported a total membership of eight thousand.71 The celebration ended abruptly, however, as thousands of families found themselves landless during the harsh winter of 1934–35. The eight-thousand-strong union stood helpless in the face of New Deal-induced evictions, and no antifascist slogans or demands for self-determination could solve their quandary.