Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and National Farm Labor Union

Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and National Farm Labor Union. Galvanized by a 1934 visit to northeast Arkansas by the socialist leader Norman Thomas, local Socialist party members H.L. Mitchell and Clay East helped found the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU). Initially focused on securing for sharecroppers government payments under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's crop‐reduction program, the STFU quickly evolved into an interracial social movement that challenged the power wielded by large landholders over indebted sharecroppers, tenants, and small farmers in the rural South. Led by a coalition of socialists, radical Christians, and African American preachers, the organization by 1936 had enrolled 25,000 members in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas, uniting black and white sharecroppers for the first time since the Populist movement of the 1890s.

Appealing to “laborers, share‐croppers, renters, or small landowners whose lands are worked by themselves,” the STFU organized men and women victimized by the collapse of the cotton economy during the 1930s. The union led a strike of Arkansas cotton pickers in 1936, and it also sought to break the dependency engendered by the crop‐lien system, which kept sharecroppers and tenants perpetually in debt to their landlords.

Despite its rapid expansion and early success, the STFU declined by the end of the 1930s. The union's most significant achievement, the creation of an interracial social movement in the segregated South, made it vulnerable to violent repression by planters and their allies. Factional disputes generated by the sharecroppers' uneasy alliance with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was oriented primarily toward industrial workers, weakened the STFU internally. Finally, the later 1930s saw the rapid uprooting from the land of the very people the union sought to organize, thwarting the hopes of the STFU's leadership to remake the rural South by replacing the plantation and crop‐lien system with interracial cooperative farms.

Renamed the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) in 1946, the union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Although in its new incarnation the NFLU recruited farmworkers in California and Louisiana, it never regained its identity as a radical social movement. Nevertheless, the STFU's original vision of an interracial movement of the poor provided an important precedent for the civil rights movement that would transform the South thirty years later.
See also Agriculture: Since 1920; Cotton Industry; Labor Movements; New Deal Era, The; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Socialism; Socialist Party of America.

Bibliography

Howard Kester , Revolt among the Sharecroppers, 1936, reprint 1997.
Donald H. Grubbs , Cry from the Cotton Gin: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal, 1971.

Alex Lichtenstein