The New Deal’s primary solution to agricultural crisis was retrenchment in agricultural production, supplemented by subsidies to cooperating farmers. The program succeeded in raising agricultural prices, but in the South it was disastrous for many tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers. Many landlords appropriated to themselves acreage reduction benefits that were supposed to be paid to tenants. Worse, in many places where acreage was cut back, landowners simply dispossessed tenants and sharecroppers, who were then reduced to the status of casual laborers and had to be fed from relief funds. Together, blacks and whites organized tenant farmers’ unions. Those formed in the New Deal era were not the first of such experiments. During the earlier years of the Depression a Sharecroppers’ Union in Alabama was violently broken up. But the most effective organizational efforts were made in Arkansas, where two young socialists, H. L. Mitchell and Clay East, with the advice and backing of Norman Thomas and the Socialist party, organized the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Earlier organizational attempts by sharecroppers and tenants had been made in Arkansas, but had been violently suppressed: in 1919, for example, a union of blacks in Phillips County had been massacred. This new movement was inter-racial. Socialists and ministers were prominent among its organizers, and by 1935 there were 10,000 members in 80 local units. They stressed peaceful action, and spent much time arguing that the New Deal’s agricultural program hurt the small farmers. In 1935 local whites and absentee corporations began to try to break the union by violence. Although some of its members were killed, and numbers of other harassed, attacked, and jailed, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union persisted. One large strike led by its members was moderately successful, but they were never able to change the economic structure of the area.
The following account is taken from a contemporary pamphlet written by Howard Kester, a minister and S.T.F.U. organizer: Revolt Among the Sharecroppers (1936), 82–5. See Stuart Jamieson: Labor Unionism in American Agriculture (1945); and David Eugene Conrad: Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (1965).
While violence of one type or another had been continuously poured out upon the membership of the union from its early beginning, it was in March 1935 that a “reign of terror” ripped into the country like a hurricane. For two and a half months violence raged throughout northeastern Arkansas and in neighboring states until it looked at times as if the union would be completely smashed. Meetings were banned and broken up, members were falsely accused, arrested and jailed, convicted on trumped up charges and thrown into prison; relief was shut off; union members were evicted from the land by the hundreds; homes were riddled with bullets from machine guns; churches were burned and schoolhouses stuffed with hay and the floors removed; highways were patrolled night and day by armed vigilantes looking for the leaders; organizers were beaten, mobbed and murdered until the entire country was terrorized. Some idea of the extent and character of the terror may be gained by citing a few instances which occurred in the space of ten days from the 21st of March to the 1st of April. All of these incidents were reported by either the Associated Press, the United Press, the Federated Press or by special correspondents assigned to the fields, and may be checked by those who wish to do so.
March 21st
A mob of approximately forty men, led by the manager of one of the largest plantations in Poinsett County, a town constable, a deputy sheriff, and composed of planters and riding bosses, attempted to lynch the Rev. A. B. Brookins, seventy-year-old Negro minister, chaplain of the union and a member of the National Executive Council.
After the mob had failed on four different occasions to lure Brookins from his cabin in Marked Tree, the mob turned their guns upon his home and riddled it with bullets. Brookins escaped in his night clothes while his daughter was shot through the head and his wife escaped death by lying prone upon the floor.
March 21st
W. H. Stultz, president of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, found a note on his doorsteps warning him to leave Poinsett County within twenty-four hours. This note, written on a typewriter, was signed with ten X’s and said, “We have decided to give you twenty-four hours to get out of Poinsett County.”
On the following day Stultz was taken into the office of the Chapman-Dewey Land Company by A. C. Spellings, Fred Bradsher and Bob Frazier on a pretext that Chief of Police Shannabery wanted to see him. While in the offices guns were laid upon a nearby barrel by the vigilantes and efforts were made by them to get Stultz to give them a pretext whereby to kill him. After being detained for three hours he was told by one of the men that he would “personally see to it that if you don’t leave town that your brains are blown out and your body thrown in the St. Francis River.” Stultz, the father of six small children, had been a sharecropper until driven from the land because of union activities. Night riders terrorized his family and attempted to blow up his home, and in order to save them from almost certain death he and his family were moved to Memphis by the union.
March 21st
The Rev. T. A. Allen, Negro preacher and organizer of the union, was found shot through the heart and his body weighted with chains and rocks in the waters of the Coldwater River near Hernando, Mississippi. The sheriff informed the reporter of the United Press that Allen was probably killed by enraged planters and that there would be no investigation.
March 22nd
Mrs. Mary Green, wife of a member of the union in Mississippi County, died of fright when armed vigilantes came to her home to lynch her husband who was active in organizing the sharecroppers in that county.
March 22nd
After threatening Clay East, former President of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and Miss Mary Hillyer, of New York, with violence if they addressed a meeting of the union in Marked Tree, a mob drove the two into the office of C. T. Carpenter, the union attorney, surrounded the building and blocked all exits. After requesting protection from the mayor, East agreed to talk with the mob. He was told that if he ever returned to Poinsett County that he would be shot on sight. Mayor Fox finally interceded with the mob, which allowed Mr. East and Miss Hillyer to leave town but formed an armed band to escort them out of the county.
March 23rd
An armed band of twenty or thirty men attempted to kill C. T. Carpenter of Marked Tree, attorney for the union, at his home shortly before midnight. The leaders of the mob demanded that Carpenter give himself up, but this he refused to do. With gun in hand, Carpenter prevented the mob from breaking into his home. The presence of his wife probably prevented the mob from shooting directly at Carpenter, but as they departed they poured bullets into the porch and sides of the house, breaking out the lights.
On the following night a committee from the vigilantes called upon Mr. Carpenter in his office and threatened to shoot him there if he did not sever his connections with the union. This he refused to do.
An item in the New York Times reads “A band of forty-odd night riders fired upon the home of C. T. Carpenter, southern Democrat, whose father fought with General Lee in the Army of the Confederacy. The raid was a climax to a similar attack upon the homes of Negro members of the union.”
March 27th
John Allen, secretary of the union on the Twist plantation in Cross County, escaped a mob of riding bosses and deputies, who were trying to lynch him, by hiding in the swamps around the St. Francis River.
During the frantic search for Allen numerous beatings occurred. When a Negro woman refused to reveal Allen’s whereabouts her ear was severed from her head by a lick from the gun of a riding boss.
March 30th
An armed band of vigilantes mobbed a group of Negro men and women who were returning home from church near Marked Tree. Both men and women were severely beaten by pistols and flashlights and scores of children were trampled underfoot by the members of the mob.
March 30th
A Negro church near Hitchiecoon, in which the union had been holding meetings, was burned to the ground by vigilantes.
March 30th
Walter Moskop, a member of the trio which toured the East in behalf of the union narrowly escaped a mob which had gathered about his home to lynch him. Moskop’s eleven-year-old son overheard the conversation between the vigilantes and informed his father of the mob’s intention just in time for him to be smuggled out of his home by friends.
April 2nd
The home of the Rev. E. B. McKinney, vice-president of the union, was riddled with more than two hundred and fifty bullets from machine guns by vigilantes. McKinney’s family and a number of friends were inside. Two occupants of the home were severely wounded and the family given until sunrise to get out of the county. The mob was looking for H. L. Mitchell and the author who were reported to be holding a meeting in McKinney’s home at the time.
Shortly after Norman Thomas returned to New York he spoke over a coast-to-coast hook-up of the NBC. He opened his address with these words: “There is a reign of terror in the cotton country of eastern Arkansas. It will end either in the establishment of complete and slavish submission to the vilest exploitation in America or in bloodshed, or in both.… The plantation system involves the most stark serfdom and exploitation that is left in the Western world.”