Abstract
Hopeless circumstances in cotton country—debt peonage, floods, drought, and, finally, the Great Depression—caused many of King Cotton’s victims to despair, turn to drink, or in other ways abandon their families. The economic crisis caused John Handcox, on the other hand, to find new meaning to his life. When he quit sharecropping at the end of 1935, he began to write. He also found a newspaper in which to publish, and most importantly, a movement to join. John’s grandfather’s stories of slavery, the music he learned in church, and the poetry he read by Paul Laurence Dunbar all had prepared him to join “the revolt of the sharecroppers,” a phrase that rang through the labor reform agenda of the mid-1950s. In school, he had written songs and poems to amuse, but now he would use them to promote a startling historic departure, in which black and white tenants, both sharecroppers and renters, and wage laborers joined together in a union.
I wrote about the way the poor were being treated by the rich. I help to organize them so we all could get out of the ditches.
—John Handcox1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
William Manchester, “The Crudest Year,” in From Reconstruction to the Present, vol. 2 of Portrait of America, ed. Stephen Oates (1983), 198.
Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years; A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Ned Cobb and Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (1974, 1984), 264.
Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” in Guthrie, Alan Lomax, and Pete Seeger, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People. New York: Oak Publications, 1967, 115.
James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008.
Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class, Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984, 33–4, 51–4, 57, 59, 60–2, 65, 67.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Hosea Hudson, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South, ed. Nell Irving Painter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979; Progress Publishers, Recent History of the Labor Movement, 1918–1939. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, 192–202.
Progress Publishers, Recent History of the Labor Movement, 1918–1939. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, 192–202.
Ronald Cohen, Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States. Crockett, CA: Carquinez Press, 2010, 70–3.
John A. Salmond, Gastonia 1929, The Story of the Loray Mill Strike. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
John Beecher, “In Egypt Land,” in Working Lives: the Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South, ed. Marc Miller (1980), 143–54.
Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, 147–52.
Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era Through New Deal, 1929— 1941. New York: Rinehart, 1947, 179.
H. L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1979, 188.
Pete Daniel, “The Crossroads of Change: Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures in the Twentieth—Century South.” Journal of Southern History (1984), 445.
George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945. Louisiana State University Press, 1967, 392–3.
James D. Ross, Jr., “‘I ain’t got no home in this world’: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in Arkansas,” (PhD dissertation, Auburn University, 2004).
Donald Grubbs, Cry From the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1971, 19–25, 43–57.
Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995, 11.
John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 154–6.
Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1936, 54–9.
Robert F. Martin, Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904–77. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.
Jason Manthorne, “The View from the Cotton: Reconsidering the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Agricultural History 84 (2010).
H. L. Mitchell’s Roll the Union On, A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Chicago: C. H. Kerr Pub. Co., 1987.
Robert F Martin, Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904–77. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991, chs. 1–4.
Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
David R. Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Joe William Trotter, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997, 60–61.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, If You Don’t Go Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Gregory John Hall, “Rituals and Secrecy in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Australian Journal of American Studies 21:2 (December 2002), 1–14.
M. Fannin, Labor’s Promised Land: Radical Visions of Gender, Race, and Religion in the South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003, 249.
Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Stith interviewed in “The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Southern Exposure, 1:3 and 4 (Winter, 1974), 6–32.
Robert Hunt Ferguson, “The Land, the Lord, and the Union: Earthly and Spiritual Salvation in the Protest Songs of John L. Handcox,” Arkansas Review, 43: 2 (Summer/August 2012), 75–82.
Elizabeth Anne Payne and Louise Boyle, “The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Southern Cultures 4:2 (1998), 5–27.
Robert Wood, “To Live and Die in Dixie” (New York: Southern Workers Defense Committee, 1936).
Scott Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend. London: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Copyright information
© 2013 Michael K. Honey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Honey, M.K. (2013). The Planter and the Sharecropper: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. In: Sharecropper’s Troubadour. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137088369_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137088369_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-11128-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08836-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)