11/11/2022 0 Comments Cartoon share croppr![]() ![]() In 1974, Southern Exposure, the print forerunner to Facing South, published a nearly 230-page issue of oral histories titled "No More Moanin': Voices of Southern Struggle." For it, Sue Thrasher and Leah Wise interviewed people who had been involved in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. It later changed its name to the National Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural and Allied Workers' Union and remained active until 1970. Though its leaders faced harassment and attacks, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union had chapters across the South and spread into the Southeast. It aimed to help farmers work out fairer arrangements with landowners and to ensure sharecroppers and tenant farmers got a fair cut of Depression-era federal farm support payments that went to landowners. (Photo via Library of Congress)įifteen years after it took place, the massacre was heavy on the minds of a group of Black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers as they gathered about 100 miles north of Elaine in the small city of Tyronza, Arkansas, and organized the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union - one of the few unions of the time open to Black and white people. Robert Lee Hill, the organizer of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, as seen in a Depression-era Farm Security Administration photograph. The incident is known as the Elaine Massacre. Historians estimate hundreds of Black people were killed. Mobs of armed white men from across the Mississippi River poured into Phillips County, launching a days-long killing spree of Black people. ![]() ![]() Local white planters and landowners reacted with extreme violence. White sheriff's deputies arrived to a meeting of the union outside a church in Hoop Spur, near the city of Elaine, and gun violence broke out. In September 1919, a group of Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas organized a chapter of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, a union founded after World War I by Black tenant farmer Robert Lee Hill. They also inspired numerous union organizing attempts. Both systems were highly exploitative and marked by tremendous power imbalances that left sharecroppers and tenant farmers trapped in perpetual debt. Others in the region were tenant farmers who rented the land they worked but owned their crops in full. became widespread across the South after the Civil War and emancipation, and sharecroppers were usually formerly enslaved people or poor white farmers. As in the rest of the Deep South, the economy of the Arkansas Delta in the early 20th century was marked by sharecropping, a system in which a farmer rents land from the owner in exchange for a cut of the crop. ![]()
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