In retrospect, I believe that those responsible for liquidating the Sharecroppers Union were motivated by a sort of crude trade union economism, a desire to restrict the struggle of Black soil tillers to economic issues . . . and a feeling that the existence of an independent and mainly Black union with the explosive potential of the Sharecroppers Union would frighten off our new democratic front allies: the Roosevelt New Dealers, the Southern moderates and the CIO leadership.
—Harry Haywood
If the rise and demise of social movements can be explained in terms of “correct” versus “incorrect” theoretical positions, then the observations of black ex-Communist Harry Haywood would make perfect sense. By 1937 most Central Committee members thought Alabama's underground rural union was a blemish on the Party's new liberal face. But to reduce the SCU's decline to political machinations from afar is to miss the significance of local and national factors, particularly transformations caused by federal intervention in cotton production, the emergence of the Socialist-led STFU, the radicalization of the National Farmers’ Union movement, and the SCU's inability to mitigate antiunion repression. The specific policies developed and implemented by SCU leadership must be seen as a response to a multiplicity of political and economic factors.
Described glowingly in 1932 as the Southern vanguard in the fight for self-determination, the SCU led by Al Murphy came under severe criticism two years later for its failure to recruit even a single white farmer. By December 1934, the Central Committee tried to remedy the situation by replacing Murphy with white Communist and veteran trade union organizer Clyde Johnson, who was in New York at the time recovering from a near-fatal beating he had received at the hands of Birmingham police. Johnson had expressed an interest in rural work even before he was assigned to Birmingham. When he first moved South in 1933, he worked for the Farm Holiday Association in Rome, Georgia, before he was run out of the county, and during his brief respite in New York, Johnson had begun to organize dairy workers on Long Island. With renewed enthusiasm, though still a little weak from pneumonia he had contracted in jail, Johnson drove back to Alabama with black Tallapoosa Communist Hosea Hart in January 1935.1
Johnson's appointment was partly intended to legitimize the SCU as an interracial organization at a moment when black-white unity constituted the cornerstone of the united front in the South.2 But the Central Committee's intentions did not reflect the thoughts, dreams, and frustrations of the actors involved. Al Murphy, for example, wished to leave his post as SCU secretary as early as 1934, mainly because of the Party's inadequate financial support, and because the tremendous work load (compounded by isolation and a constant threat of violence) placed a great strain on his health. The Party's vacillating attitude toward self-determination in the black belt further contributed to his growing disillusionment; on several occasions he castigated national leadership for not distributing the Liberator in the South. Therefore, late in 1934 Murphy left the black belt for good and headed for New York. (A few months later, he boarded a ship for Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International.) Likewise, Johnson's eagerness to accept the position had little to do with the Central Committee's reasons for making the appointment. The independent radical did not see himself as an exemplar of interracial harmony for the benefit of the Party's newfound liberal allies, nor did he fit the Southern Popular Front mold. Still in his twenties, the lanky, boyish figure exuded the idealism of his college days, yet possessed the battle scars of the seasoned Birmingham underground. An able and militant labor leader sensitive to the needs of blacks, Johnson was genuinely excited about the prospect of organizing landless farmers and agricultural workers caught up in tumultuous changes brought on by the New Deal.3
Aside from a very brief meeting with Murphy, whom he met for the first and last time, Johnson was given no preparation for his new task. As soon as he settled in Tallapoosa County he adopted the pseudonym “Larry Coleman” and initially signed all of the union's correspondence with Murphy's name so that local authorities could not detect a change in leadership. He later assumed several pen names, including “Tom Burke” and “Albert Jackson” to confuse police and protect his identity. While addressing local meetings in churches and schoolhouses packed to capacity, he discovered firsthand the size and extent of the SCU, particularly in Tallapoosa, Chambers, and Montgomery counties. Curiosity attracted unusually large crowds anxious to meet the new secretary, but the strong showing was also indicative of the union's rapid growth; Johnson discovered twice as many locals as Murphy had originally reported. Recognizing the need for centralization and order, he immediately created an executive board comprised of elected county representatives, with Hosea Hart (who used the name “Harry Williams” just about everywhere except in his hometown of Dadeville) presiding. Executive meetings were provisionally held in Tallapoosa County but were soon moved to Montgomery once headquarters were reestablished there, although meetings and activities still remained underground. Black Party leaders Charles and Capitola Tasker, for example, produced SCU leaflets with a mimeograph machine they kept hidden in their home and surreptitiously left packages of leaflets at Al Jackson's barbershop (another black Montgomery Communist) for organizers who regularly came by for a “trim.”4
The SCU's apparent growth had much to do with the wave of evictions prompted by the Bankhead Cotton Control Act, which made acreage reduction mandatory. Although most tenants were evicted weeks after the last harvest had been picked and baled, landlords generally waited until the new crop had been planted before throwing their tenants off the land. At a moment when tenants were most vulnerable, having to rely on food and cash advances to survive, planters invited the evicted tenants back as wage laborers to chop cotton for as little as thirty cents per day. In counties further south, especially Dallas, Montgomery, and Lowndes, wage laborers received as little as four dollars per month plus board. As one evicted sharecropper explained, “The white landowners will not allow our people to work on shares, nor rent us land. . . . Many of our comrades have nothing to live on and nothing to wear.” In desperation, a black woman Communist asked the Daily Worker, “What is we going to do? We do not want to steal if we can get round it. But, dear comrades, your stomach will make you do things you do not want to do. You will be so hungry, and you be bare footed and naked.” Even white tenants were beginning to feel the effects of the Cotton Control Act. In Tallapoosa County, where several white tenant families had been evicted, black SCU members and white farmers met jointly on several occasions to discuss the Bankhead legislation.5
Johnson's first major decision was to follow through with Murphy's plan for a cotton choppers’ strike in the spring of 1935. Laborers in Lowndes, Tallapoosa, Montgomery, Lee, Randolph, Dallas, and Chambers counties were instructed to leave the fields on May 1 unless they received a daily wage of one dollar. Leaflets were also distributed calling for a ten-hour workday, equal pay for women and youth, and no discrimination against blacks.6 The strike was clearly the union's largest campaign to date, encompassing some fifteen hundred laborers spread over thirty-five plantations. As had been the strategy in the past, strikers neither picketed nor engaged in openly militant activities but instead used their wiles to avoid violent confrontation. “If the landlord doesn't give the $1,” Johnson observed, “the croppers [would] say that every one else has said they would not work for less than $ 1 and that they are striking with them. Or that they are afraid to go against the majority. Or that they are too sick to work. The answers usually depend on the terror.”7
Where the SCU was relatively strong, mainly Tallapoosa, Lee, and Chambers counties, the cotton choppers won most of their demands and experienced comparatively little violence, but in Lowndes, Montgomery, and particularly Dallas counties, the repression was insurmountable. In Dallas County sixteen SCU members were arrested and several were flogged for taking part in the strike. When black Communist Saul Davis returned to his hometown of Selma to inquire about the sixteen incarcerated SCU members, he was arrested and immediately released into the custody of a hostile mob. Hearing of Davis's disappearance, ILD organizer Robert Washington was dispatched from Birmingham to investigate his arrest and to assist the strikers. On the evening of May 18, Washington experienced a repeat performance of what had happened to his comrade Saul Davis. After spending a night in jail, Washington later testified, “I pleaded with [the sheriff] that I was a stranger in Selma and would like to remain in the station overnight, so that I could take a bus or a train to Birmingham on Monday morning; and he said; ‘I am going to release you, you black son of a bitch, right now.’” Dragged to a side door of the police station and handed over to eight armed men in two automobiles, Washington was driven about fourteen miles beyond the city limits, stripped, and beaten with a leather strap for nearly an hour. Forced to walk to the county line as several men fired shots above his head, he miraculously made it back to Birmingham—alive but writhing in pain and quite shaken. Unbeknownst to Washington at the time, a young ILD organizer named John “Willie” Foster was sent to Selma the very next day to investigate Washington's arrest, but as soon he entered the city, he too was arrested and released to a gang of vigilantes. Unlike Washington and Davis (who also appeared in Birmingham a few days later), Foster was never heard from again.8
Share Croppers’ Union membership card (courtesy Clyde Johnson)
White Communists in Dallas County also fell victim to vigilante violence. With the strike less than two weeks old, Party members Boris Israel (alias Blaine Owen) and Henry “Red” Johnson traveled to Dallas County to obtain a firsthand perspective on the strike's progress. During a meeting of tenants and farm laborers, Selma police officers who had been tipped off about the gathering forcibly entered the house with guns drawn and arrested Israel and Johnson. In the midst of interrogating the two men about their activities, Selma's chief of police tried to impress upon them the importance of crushing all forms of opposition in the black belt: “We got eight niggers to every white man here. . . . We got a hard enough time keeping down trouble without you coming around and stirring things up.” When night fell Israel and Johnson were released, only to meet several armed vigilantes outside the police station. After being shuttled into a waiting vehicle, the two white Communists were pummeled continuously for hours as they drifted in and out of consciousness. Arriving at a destination well beyond the city limits, they were stripped bare, tied to a tree, and flogged with heavy rope and a horsewhip while one of their kidnappers pressed lighted matches into their wounds. When the torturous night finally came to an end, their limp yet breathing bodies were dumped on the highway just outside Selma.9
The strike was eventually crushed in Dallas County. In Lowndes, where three union organizers were arrested and several suffered brutal beatings, the strikers fared no better. But in the remaining counties the SCU won a dollar per day on most of the targeted plantations, and on others the strikers settled for seventy-five cents plus three meals and free transportation to and from work. The demand for a ten-hour day was honored on only two or three plantations. Dairy workers and plow hands, spurred on by the cotton choppers’ strike, also walked off their jobs, some winning weekly wage increases from $2.50 to $3.50 while several regular farm hands more than doubled their monthly incomes. Although wage increases were not uniform and only a handful of plantations were affected, these minor victories attracted more union adherents. By the summer of 1935, total membership ballooned to nearly ten thousand. And despite meager funds, Johnson launched the SCU's first organ, the Union Leader: A Voice of the White and Negro Farm Toilers of the South. In the spirit of “twentieth century Americanism,” it's first issue appeared appropriately on the Fourth of July.10
The cotton choppers’ strike provided valuable lessons for Johnson and other rural organizers. Small victories were won by wage laborers and landless farmers who toiled on cotton plantations during picking time, but union organizers realized they could neither stop evictions nor impede the overwhelming repression union members in the black belt faced. Indeed, several weeks after the strike had been declared over, Dallas County SCU leaders were still reeling from the effects of antiradical violence. On July 11, organizer Joe Spinner Johnson was picked up by police and handed over to a gang of vigilantes a few days later. His body was found in an empty field near Greensboro, Alabama.11
In an effort to strengthen the SCU, Johnson and Donald Henderson, a Central Committee member who also served as director of the National Committee for Unity of Rural and Agricultural Workers, sought an alliance with the newly formed STFU. Founded in 1934 by Socialists Henry Clay East and H. L. Mitchell in Tyronza, Arkansas, the STFU resembled the SCU in many respects. Advocating “Land for the Landless,” it opposed the AAA and fought evictions, but unlike the Communist Party the STFU did not see the crisis as a class struggle in which the federal government played a duplicitous role in support of the ruling landlords.12 Nevertheless, as early as November 1934, Al Murphy submitted to Mitchell a united front agreement advocating unity around a common program that included opposition to the Bankhead Cotton Control Act and the Gin Tax Act and support for the Communist-sponsored Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill. The Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill would have repealed the AAA, banned foreclosures and evictions, and created a farmer-administered relief plan. Although STFU leaders responded favorably to the agreement, the issue of a united front was not raised again until May 1935, when representatives of the two organizations attended a national conference held at Howard University under the auspices of the Joint Committee on National Recovery and Howard's social science department. Following their formal addresses to the participants, Hosea Hart and Clyde Johnson met privately with STFU delegates to discuss the possibility of united action. No formal agreement resulted from the talks, but H. L. Mitchell appeared supportive of the Alabama sharecroppers. After the conference he gratefully noted that the SCU was “giving us much help in explaining to us its methods of work where they have been successful.”13
In July, Johnson wrote STFU leader J. R. Butler requesting a formal united front agreement between the two organizations, and a month later Johnson and Hart met with Mitchell in Memphis to discuss the possibility of a merger. Mitchell was outwardly enthusiastic but privately had misgivings. After meeting with SCU activists in Lowndes County upon Johnson's invitation, he concluded disdainfully that the “so-called Sharecropper [sic] Union of Alabama was practically indistinguishable from the Communist Party.” Thus, while the STFU executive board announced its support for the merger, both Mitchell and J.R. Butler worked behind the scenes to ensure that no merger would take place. When Johnson suggested a joint STFU-SCU cotton pickers’ strike in August, for example, STFU leadership quietly rejected the idea, but a few weeks later announced plans for its own cotton pickers’ strike, independent of the SCU.14
Nevertheless, Johnson proceeded with plans for a mass cotton pickers’ strike. The union's primary goal was to win one dollar per hundred pounds for seasonal pickers. They also demanded a minimum of one dollar per day plus room and board (or two meals and free transportation to and from work) and a ten-hour maximum workday for day laborers; a minimum forty-hour week at twenty cents an hour for rural relief workers; immediate relief for all strikers; no evictions; and equal wages irrespective of race, sex, or age. Recalling the problems faced by the union during the cotton choppers’ strike, Johnson took even greater precautions in preparing for the pickers’ walkout in August. First, he appealed to the AFU, the STFU, and the AFL to contribute to the SCU's meager strike fund, though none offered much support. Second, anticipating state relief director Thad Holt's order to remove all workers from the relief rolls who refused to pick cotton, as well as similar action by the Montgomery Reemployment Service and the county relief agencies, Johnson tried to organize local relief workers alongside the SCU. In conjunction with the cotton pickers’ strike, Charles Tasker led two mass demonstrations of WPA workers in Montgomery's Exchange Park to demand increases in wages and relief and to oppose the use of relief workers as strike breakers in the cotton fields. Police dispersed both meetings, and the city responded by passing its own criminal anarchy ordinance. In Chambers County the SCU appealed to sixty-five relief workers brought specifically to replace striking labor. It was reported that thirteen of the relief workers simply quit on the spot and the remainder opted to join the strike.15
As planned, the strike first erupted on J. R. Bell's plantation in Lowndes County, where an estimated twelve hundred tenants, sharecroppers, and farm workers earned a paltry sum of forty cents per hundred pounds. Led by Ed Knight and Ed Bracey, the Lowndes County SCU had apparently recovered from the 1935 choppers’ strike and established locals stretching from Hope Hull to Fort Deposit. In July alone, for example, the Lowndes County committee added three hundred members to its ranks. The determination there was tremendous: “There is going to be hell if they try to break up our meeting. We workers on the Bell farm are organized and Mr. Bell or anyone else will catch hell trying to stop us now.” And hell it was. On the morning of August 19, J. R. Bell rose only to discover that his cotton bolls were ripe but his fields were empty. He immediately contacted Haynesville sheriff R. E. Woodruff to remedy the situation. When Woodruff and his deputies arrived, they approached SCU organizer Willie Witcher and tried to convince him to call off the strike and return to work. Witcher politely responded in the negative and slowly walked back to his shack on the Bell plantation. Almost as soon as Witcher turned his back, the frustrated sheriff shot him in the thigh and handcuffed and mercilessly beat him before locking him up in the Haynesville jail, his wounds unattended.16
That evening, Woodruff organized a posse which scoured the county, committing atrocities against strikers and nonstrikers along the way. Jim Press Merriweather and his entire family, all union members, were among the posse's first victims. As soon as the strike began, plantation owner John Frank Bates evicted the Merriweather family, forcing them to move in with Jim's brother Phillip. Then on the night of August 22, Jim Merriweather was captured by the posse, accused of shooting a strike breaker, and summarily executed. According to police reports, Merriweather miraculously broke away from four fully armed men, jumped into a nearby ditch, and picked up a shotgun which he had allegedly planted there earlier. When he fired at the “officers,” claimed Sheriff Woodruff, his captors retaliated and killed him. Forcing their way into Phillip Merriweather's home, the mob continued its reign of terror against the rest of his family. Phillip broke from his captors and escaped down an embankment, but Jim's wife, Annie Mae, was not so lucky. She was stripped, possibly raped, and beaten with a knotted rope while she hung from a wooden beam.17
Merriweather's murder was part of a larger scheme to assassinate known union leaders, most of whom had been identified by informants. On Labor Day, Sheriff Woodruff and his posse fatally wounded SCU leader Ed Bracey as he tried to escape an ambush, and a few days later the body of Rev. G. Smith Watkins, a Baptist preacher and SCU leader, turned up riddled with buckshot in a nearby swamp. Lowndes County Communist organizer Ed Knight luckily escaped a similar fate; when he returned to his tiny shack late one evening his furniture had been smashed and the mob had left a note on his door warning him that he was next to die.18 The strike provoked such unbridled violence that many victims were neither strikers nor union supporters. Three unidentified transients suspected of union membership were found dead in a swamp, and dozens of people were rounded up and squeezed into the overcrowded Haynesville jail. In Notasulga, a posse raided a women's missionary convention, which they thought was a guise for a union meeting, and assaulted several women in the process. And three days after Witcher's arrest, vigilantes flogged an elderly Lowndes County woman and her sisters for allegedly providing support for the strike.19
Antiunion repression was not limited to the rural areas. Searching desperately for the elusive “Albert Jackson,” Montgomery police arrested Communists James Cobb, Charles Tasker, and James Jackson. After a brutal interrogation, Jackson and Tasker were ordered to leave Montgomery. Continuing their search, police located and arrested two Albert Jacksons, one being the Party's Montgomery contact and the other an old bootlegger who had no radical associations whatsoever. When it was discovered that neither the bootlegger nor the black Montgomery barber was the SCU leader, the Montgomery police department, in concert with the city's postmaster, tried to trap Clyde Johnson by refusing to accept payment for the union's post office box unless “Albert Jackson” appeared in person.20
The violence evoked an emotional, militant response from union activists. In a resolution to Governor Graves from the Lowndes County committee, signed only “Share Cropper Union, Ala.,” the strikers demanded “the fredom [sic] of the Negro share Croppers that was shot and arrested for Union activities and carryed to Hayesville [sic] Alabama to jail.” More than civil liberties were at stake. “This also is part of the landlords scheme to brake the [c]otton pigking strike and to force them into more misery and starvation. . . . We are holding you responcible for all this and are demanding justice for these two croppers!” As word of the violence spread, armed strikers organized their own “posses” and in one instance a group “met the vigilantes as they started to raid a striker's shack. When the gang saw the opposition was formidable, they ran, and since then the raids have not been so frequent.” Lemon Johnson remembers a similar case occurring on the night of Merriweather's death in which an armed contingent of women from the Hope Hull local set out along Route 31 near Hickory Grove in search of “some of the mob to shoot at.”21
The immediate victories were relatively significant, particularly in Tallapoosa and Lee counties. On several plantations union workers returned to the fields earning between seventy-five cents and one dollar per hundred pounds, in some cases with the right to gin and sell their own cotton. On at least one Montgomery County plantation, strikers won the full one dollar per hundred pound wage rate. In Lowndes County, however, where SCU organizers entered the strike suffused with confidence, the union emerged from the debacle quite shaken. Opposition was so overwhelming that by early September strikers were returning to work at the rate of forty cents per one hundred pounds.22 Reflecting on the loss of comrades and dear friends who gave their lives in the cotton pickers’ strike, Clyde Johnson penned a lyric tribute entitled, “To Those Who Fell”:
Look yonder, you who still believe
The rotten lies the landlords tell,
Look at the blood drenched cotton fields
Where your brothers fought and fell.
Listen to the landlord's trembling brag
Of shooting strikers in the back,
Of riding murder gangs in the dark of night,
Of beating wives and children in their shacks.
Our comrades challenged the landlord's greed,
Their hunger, misery and oppression.
They built the Union Strong,
They taught us a mighty lesson. . . .
SHAKE IN YOUR BOOTS, YOU LANDLORD DOGS!
The day of final reckoning is near.
The farming masses, white and black,
Will smash your rotting seat of power! . . .23
Through the Daily Worker and liberal news publications, Johnson, along with Donald Henderson and Joe Gelders of the NCDPP, publicized the beatings, arrests, and murders that had occurred during the strike. Governor Bibb Graves received numerous telegrams, resolutions, postcards, and letters from all over the country protesting the shooting and arrests of SCU members and the murders of Joe Spinner Johnson, Ed Bracey, Jim Merriweather, and Smith Watkins.24 Accompanied by a delegation of three union members who had been run out of Lowndes County—Annie Mae Merriweather, Wesley Smith, and Henry Roberts—Johnson traveled first to New York to raise funds and discuss the recent strike and then continued to Washington, D.C., where the group arranged a conference with President Roosevelt and filed formal protests with the AAA, the Rural Resettlement Administration, and the postmaster general. AAA administrator Chester Davis promised to conduct an investigation, but the administration's efforts did not lead to a single indictment.25
Johnson returned from Washington weary and disappointed, his memory still stinging from the loss of his comrades. But in January 1936, he was given an emotional boost when his friend, former Atlanta ILD worker Leah Anne Agron, arrived in Birmingham to serve as his secretary. Sharing a tiny semibasement apartment in Tarrant City, Anne and Clyde were married on March 4. Despite the companionship, the constant harassment and work that went into organizing an underground union took its toll. A few months later a visitor walked into the tiny Johnson household and saw “a young Southerner, thirty perhaps, white and frail with dark rings under his eyes. He talked without heroics of the dangers and difficulties of his work. ... He and his wife had an odd calmness and sat very still as they talked.”26
With Anne's help Johnson worked to reinvigorate the SCU, implementing substantive changes in the union's structure with the intention of transforming it from an underground, armed organization to an open and recognized trade union of agricultural laborers. After long discussions within the SCU executive board, it was decided that establishing an open national office was a necessary first step toward legitimizing the SCU as a bona fide trade union. The board first decided on Dadeville, but as increasing numbers of Louisiana farmers sought SCU leadership, Johnson began spending considerable time away from Alabama to work with the new Louisiana state organizer, Party activist Gordon Mclntire. With the assistance of black organizers J. B. Richard and Abraham Phillips, Louisiana quickly became a beehive of union activity. A sit-down strike led by Richard stopped the FSA from evicting tenants from one of its plantations in St. Landry Parish, and under the able leadership of nineteen-year-old Phillips, Point Coupee Parish quickly became an SCU stronghold. (Two decades later, Abraham Phillips became a prominent figure in the Louisiana Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed contingent of black men who offered protection for civil rights activists.) The events in Louisiana convinced Johnson to establish headquarters in New Orleans, which eventually replaced Dadeville as the SCU's administrative center.27
Johnson continued to pursue an alliance with the STFU as well, but his appeals now fell on deaf ears. The growing anti-Communist sentiments of Mitchell, J. R. Butler, and Howard Kester, partly sparked by a personal distrust these men had for Donald Henderson, whittled away any latent support for a merger between the two movements. Throughout the winter of 1935–36, STFU leaders privately opposed organizational unity but still kept up a facade of friendly relations with the SCU. They even invited Johnson to address the second annual convention in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 1936. In a letter to Gardner “Pat” Jackson, chair of the National Committee on Rural Social Planning and an STFU supporter, Mitchell agreed that both organizations had “very much in common,” but the idea of a merger (which Jackson supported) was simply out of the question.28
Although Johnson had not yet dismissed the idea of merging with the STFU, other prospects developed due to substantive changes in Communist farm policy. Just prior to the Seventh World Congress in 1935, Party theoreticians Lem Harris and Clarence Hathaway pushed for a united front with Milo Reno's Farm Holiday Association and, to a lesser extent, made similar overtures toward the NFU. While attending the Farmers’ National Relief Conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in March 1935, Johnson found within the NFU a potential ally much more formidable than the Holiday—an observation that was later supported by several leading Communists. He felt the Party was losing its influence within the already declining Farm Holiday Association while progressive forces within the NFU seemed to be winning their battle to oust conservative E. E. Kennedy and other “Coughlinites” from leadership.29
Returning south with a new perspective, Johnson developed a close working relationship with AFU secretary W. C. Irby, a popular Birmingham Socialist who received over two thousand votes in his 1936 bid for Congress. Irby's senatorial campaign led Johnson to northern Alabama, where many AFU locals were dominated largely by racist poor-white farmers who believed black sharecroppers and tenants in the black belt region were to blame for the depressed price of cotton. Johnson and other SCU leaders used the opportunity to build an opposition movement against archconservative AFU president R. H. Sartain and his supporters, many of whom had open affiliations with the Klan. With the help of Winston County Communists McKinley Gilbert and Walker Martin, Johnson addressed crowds of white farmers in Walker, Winston, and Greene counties, deflating white supremacists’ slogans by illustrating that the current price of cotton, compounded by competition from black belt landlords, only brought their families fifty cents per day—a sum tantamount to that earned by black tenants and laborers. Johnson's speeches electrified the upcountry crowd, but other factors contributed to the AFU's radicalization. In the coal mining and textile producing region of northern Alabama, dozens of small farmers and their relatives had worked in the mines and mills and thus brought traditions of industrial unionism to the AFU at a moment when the labor movement was once again becoming a force to be reckoned with in Alabama politics. In the gulf counties, on the other hand, the AFU was growing even faster because rich, often absentee landowners were undercutting small farmers by buying huge tracts of land and establishing corporate-type plantations. As black wage workers were being transported to these huge plantations in Baldwin, Covington, and Escambia counties, AFU organizers made a concerted effort to bring these black laborers into the union as soon as they arrived. By mid-1936, radicals within the AFU had gained considerable support from the rank-and-file.30
As the prospect of an alliance between the AFU, the SCU, and possibly the STFU came nearer to fruition, Johnson, Donald Henderson, and members of the SCU executive board anticipated problems caused by combining wage labor and small farmers into one general union. The growing ranks of landless farmers-turned-wage workers faced problems radically different from small farmers and tenants. The former, the Communist argued, should now be organized along traditional labor union lines while the latter should concentrate on creating cooperatives and obtaining land and government loans. Therefore, the proposed unity agreement stipulated that sharecroppers and tenants merge into the Farmers’ Union while agricultural workers organize under the auspices of an AFL-affiliated National Agricultural Workers Union. Such a plan, of course, would have meant the end of the STFU and SCU as autonomous bodies.31
STFU leaders vehemently rejected the idea of merging and dividing the two agricultural organizations, which Mitchell characterized as “ craft unionism’ in the cotton fields.” As he explained to Donald Henderson, whom he now treated as his adversary, “We are concerned with the needs of our people and do not intend to dissipate our efforts in following new lines or old ones.” The stream of anti-SCU articles that now began to appear in the STFU's organ, the Sharecroppers Voice, added fuel to Johnson's own suspicions of Mitchell, Butler, and Kester. He not only resented the cold manner in which these men treated him at the STFU convention in January 1936 but was disappointed when several black STFU members, including the union's leading black organizer, E. B. McKinney, complained of racism and nepotism within the Arkansas-based organization. “I knew then,” Johnson recalled, “there wasn't going to be any organizational unity.”32
The NFU's radical shift, the Farm Holiday Association's decline in the Midwest, and strained relations between Communists and STFU leaders convinced Johnson that the Party should further alter its current farm policy. After two days of meetings during the ninth CPUSA convention in 1936, Johnson argued convincingly before the Central Committee that the future of rural radicalism lay in the NFU. Having won the support of Earl Browder, James Ford, and Comintern officials, Johnson was asked to work on the Agrarian Commission to implement the new policy nationally, a task he accepted reluctantly. Although he was allowed to return south to tie up loose ends and begin merger negotiations between state organizers of the NFU and the SCU, Johnson spent much of his time organizing NFU locals in the Northeast and Midwest.33
The Party's new policy was announced three weeks later during the SCU's first national convention held in New Orleans. The executive board strongly appealed for a united front with the AFU on a number of agricultural and civil rights issues and proposed the creation of joint committees to discuss the possibility of merging the two organizations. The merger proposal divided the Farmers’ Union and touched off a power struggle between the conservative leadership and the radical caucus that had been simmering for some time. The radicals, backed by strong labor supporters from Winston and Walker counties, won in the end, the AFU enthusiastically endorsing the merger proposal at its state convention in October 1936. Incensed by this development, R. H. Sartain resigned as president, and a handful of his loyalists left the convention in disgust.34
In addition to bringing a few thousand black tenants and small farmers into the hitherto all-white organization, the radicals pressed the Farmers’ Union even further to the left. A movement once dominated by staunch racists, the AFU now adopted a civil rights plank, ardently supported the newly created CIO, and accepted the SCU's slogan of “40 Acres and a Mule” as its own. It also developed marketing and purchasing cooperatives and sought to secure low-interest government loans, land grants, and federal assistance for purchasing materials. More importantly, the AFU promoted the Sharecrop Contract, a uniform agreement drafted by Johnson that was intended to clarify the terms of settlement between tenants and landlords. The contract required that all advances and wages be paid in cash, stated the tenant's right to sell his or her own crop, obliged landlords to furnish a written monthly statement of accounts, and listed the specific duties of both the tenant and the landlord with respect to crops and harvesting.35
The AFU's radical shift and incorporation of its poor black constituency, however, was neither smooth nor swift. Critical of the AFU's willingness to accept wealthy landlords into its ranks, Johnson realized a few months later that union leadership did not “understand sharecropper problems and . . . they are not proposing anything to suit their conditions.” In terms of day-to-day organizing in the black belt, the AFU contributed very little at first, especially in the way of financial support. Black SCU organizers lived literally from hand to mouth, as Saul Davis's moving request for funds in 1937 so vividly illustrates: “the workers is not able to support me. . . . please dont fail to send me some funds just is soon is you get some for i need it bad to get me some thing to eat. ... all the job i got is organization work and i like the job and do mean to struggle but got to have support to struggle.” Moreover, the relatively high membership dues required by the AFU slowed the transfer of SCU locals considerably. Accustomed to paying a joining fee of only ten cents plus regular dues of five cents per month, the SCU rank-and-file was now asked to pay an initial fee of $1.50 for each individual member and an annual fee of $1.50, without which a local could not obtain a charter.36
At first, the immediate problems created by the merger overshadowed the Communist issue. Besides, AFU organizers Walker Martin, McKinley Gilbert, Clyde Johnson, and several others concealed their Communist Party membership so as to avoid internal schisms. But by spring AFU state secretary G. S. Gravelee discovered Johnson's political affiliations and immediately raised the red scare. Claiming to have uncovered a Communist takeover in the making, Gravelee proposed expelling all union members suspected of being Reds, beginning with Clyde Johnson. Johnson, in turn, charged Gravelee with making false accusations and criticized him for dividing the union. Not only was Gravelee found guilty of the charges, but the radical wing of the AFU ran a progressive slate of candidates and swept all of the executive board positions. Both Gilbert and Martin were elected to the executive board, along with a number of independent radicals sympathetic to the Party, including the union's new president, Walker County's Vester Burkett.37
By the end of 1936, radicals had seized control of the NFU as well as the AFU. The new national leadership created a Southern Organizing Committee under the direction of Burkett, Johnson, and Communist Gordon Mclntire, who now headed the Louisiana Farmers’ Union. But before the campaign got off the ground, the union's most important link to the Alabama black belt, Clyde Johnson, was asked by Donald Henderson to remain in Washington, D.C., in order to lobby for the Wage Hour Act. Gordon Mclntire also had to withdraw soon afterward when tuberculosis kept him from continuing his work.38
The loss of Johnson, in particular, was a devastating blow to the AFU's work among rural blacks. In Tallapoosa County, once the heart of the SCU, black sharecroppers and tenants were growing distrustful of the Farmers’ Union. Vester Burkett reported in 1938 that “the Farmers Union has been misrepresented in [Tallapoosa] County. [It] is going to take some hard work to make those people believe our program.” Rather than correspond with local AFU leaders whom they did not know, sharecroppers and tenants continued to send their complaints and requests to the defunct SCU executive committee in New Orleans, which now presided over the Louisiana Farmers’ Union.39 Among the many complaints was the unsolved problem of antiunion violence. While the AFU grew considerably among white farmers in northern Alabama and in the gulf counties of Baldwin, Escambia, and Covington, it still could not mitigate repression in the black belt or in the eastern piedmont, where black tenants continued to face the same pattern of racist violence. In Dallas County, for example, black union organizer Butler Molette suffered a near-fatal beating when local authorities became aware of his activities by illegally opening his mail. And when a landlord in King's Landing, Alabama, beat union leader Phillip Ruddier to death with a hammer and assaulted Ruddier's wife, local authorities refused to prosecute him. Possibly because of distrust or the AFU's inability to reduce rural violence, or both, some black small holders and tenants turned to their old nemesis—the federal agricultural extension programs. SCU locals in Tallapoosa County protested on behalf of a black home demonstration agent who was refused entry to an eastern Alabama fair, and in both Tallapoosa and Elmore counties, union members reportedly dominated the segregated 4-H clubs.40
The shift from tenancy to rural wage labor and the adoption of mechanization constituted the most powerful barriers to the AFU's growth in the black belt. The Farmers’ Union had not developed a strategy to halt evictions, and (with the exception of the Sharecrop Contract) its agricultural programs were still concentrated on the needs of small, independent farmers. Unlike the old SCU, it was not responsible for organizing wage labor, whose ranks had grown remarkably as a result of New Deal policies. Indeed, as the number of evicted tenants multiplied, the SCU in the black belt was becoming an organization largely comprised of wage labor, and therefore its burgeoning constituency was now the responsibility of the AFL. In accordance with the original merger plans formulated in 1936, SCU farm workers in Alabama joined the FLCFWU No. 20471 under the leadership of Walker Martin.41 When the CIO split from the AFL the following year, the Alabama locals of the FLCFWU followed suit and were soon absorbed by the newly created UCAPAWA, which was now led by Donald Henderson. The founding convention of UCAPAWA elected veteran organizer Hosea Hart secretary and white Communist Richard Linsley president of District 9, covering Alabama, southern Mississippi, and Louisiana. Faced with financial difficulties and limited support from the CIO, the organizing work of District 9 proceeded at a snail's pace. After starting out with twenty-eight full-time Southern organizers, by January 1938 the number had been reduced to two. Nevertheless, by December 1938 Hart and Linsley had established fourteen locals in Alabama and reported a total paid-up membership of 1,832.42
The AFU supported UCAPAWA by formally agreeing to hire only union cotton pickers, but the agreement was little more than a symbolic gesture since union scale was nearly the same rate as the average wage in the black belt—about forty cents per hundred pounds. The Alabama locals were so weak, Linsley conceded, that any attempt to strike would have meant disaster for the fledgling union. UCAPAWA's only significant victory in the Alabama black belt was the reversal of one of the WPA's many discriminatory hiring practices. Before UCAPAWA's organizing campaign, sharecroppers, tenants, and resident farm hands could not apply for WPA jobs unless they secured their landlord's approval, which was almost always denied in order to ensure the landlord's own supply of cheap labor. Through the lobbying efforts of Linsley and Donald Henderson, however, national WPA officials in 1938 allowed union officers to sign the applications in lieu of the landlord.43
Although UCAPAWA posed no serious threat to Alabama landlords, its organizers still experienced fierce repression from local authorities. In Tallapoosa County, where the apparition of armed resistance weighed heavily on the minds of white landlords, the local sheriff utilized methods of intimidation to break the union. In 1938, Willie Joe Hart, the son of UCAPAWA secretary Hosea Hart, was jailed on a trumped-up charge of robbery and rape—a case so invidious that even an investigating committee sent by Governor Bibb Graves questioned the charges. It soon became apparent, however, that the police were really after his father. When Hosea Hart arrived at the police station to see about his son, Dadeville sheriff Cliff Corprew would only discuss the affairs of the union. He bragged of his role in the murder of several union members in the past and warned Hart that he intended to crush the union again, but this time “we're not going to use pistols and rifles. We're going to use machine guns and we're going to mow every God damn one of you down.”44
Willie Joe was subsequently released and Corprew probably realized he had no reason to bring in machine guns. When Hosea Hart was elected president of the district in 1940, the union had unraveled to such a degree that Tallapoosa was the only county with active locals. UCAPAWA's program in Alabama was reduced to securing FSA loans for tenants and sharecroppers, struggling for a fixed rent in kind for tenants, and fighting for voting rights in the black belt. As UCAPAWA dwindled closer and closer to nonexistence, a handful of veteran SCU members held on to the old radical tradition with untiring optimism. Hence, Jesse L. Burton, secretary of Local 285 in Tallapoosa and veteran of the rural movement, could say in 1940, “UCAPAWA has brought a new day for us. A new light is shining and we are all waking up and will sleep no more.”45 But many rural blacks followed another shining light of opportunity, leaving the countryside behind for opportunities in Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile, and cities beyond the boundaries of Alabama or the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, Alabama lost 147,340 of its residents between 1935 and 1940, experiencing the highest net loss of population in the Southeast.46 This trend, along with the mechanization of the cotton belt, would proceed at an even faster pace in the decade to come.
By 1940, the heyday of Communist organizing in the black belt was over. UCAPAWA soon ceased to exist in the state and the AFU continued to grow in northern Alabama and along the Gulf Coast. Although the Popular Front reinforced the Party's efforts to solve the political and economic problems of the rural South (including its divide-by-tenure policy, which ultimately led to the SCU's merger with the AFU and UCAPAWA), the destruction of the Communist-led rural movement cannot be attributed entirely to changes in the Party's line or to some kind of conspiracy to liquidate the militant sharecroppers’ movement.47 Neither the SCU, UCAPAWA, nor the AFU could have effectively reversed the massive changes that had disrupted the lives of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Alabama black belt. Perhaps if UCAPAWA and the AFU had had more resources, or if the federal government had protected rural workers’ right to organize as it had industrial and craft unions’, the movement in the black belt might have had a different history.
Although the Communists could not sustain the mass movement in the black belt counties, the merger was not without its benefits. Within a two-year period Alabama Communists turned the AFU into a formidable force on the Left and an ardent proponent of labor and civil rights in the region. Moreover, the Party's growing prominence within the AFU notably altered the character of its rural support, from poor black sharecroppers and laborers to independent white farmers. Ironically, this demographic shift in the Party's rural base occurred just as it began to lose its urban black constituency.