Over eighty percent of the farms in the Lower Mississippi River Delta Region were worked by sharecroppers and over eighty percent of those sharecroppers were black. Sharecroppers did not have money, tools, livestock, or land. Sharecroppers agreed to work the landowner’s land for a share of the proceeds from the sale of the crop. They bought their meal, meat, and molasses on credit from the planter’s commissary or from the local “furnishing” store. Few sharecroppers in the delta region had received cash income from their share of the crop since 1920.
The life of a delta sharecropper was already hard. In the 1930s, it got harder.
The year 1936 was not a good year to be a tenant farmer or a sharecropper; especially in Arkansas. The depression was hard on everyone. Farm owner C.H. Dibble owned a substantial farm near Parkin Arkansas with a large number of tenant farmers working his land. As the year began, in January of 1936, Dibble struggled with decisions about the future of his farming operation. Dibble had maintained fairly good relations with his tenant farmers but the economic hardships created tension between farm owner and farm workers. The situation came to head when neighboring planters and suppliers paid a visit to Dibble and informed him that they feared many of Dibble's tenant farmers were joining the new Southern Tenant Farmers Union and that the SFTU would soon begin collective bargaining for better living conditions and fairer agreements between workers and owners on local farms. Dibble was told in no uncertain terms than his own credit would be cut off if he didn't take drastic action to oppose the tenant farmers who had joined the STFU.
Dibble realized that he couldn't survive without the credit from suppliers and that appeasing his peers was the only means of his own survival.
Dibble would later admit that all the farm workers were excellent workers and the sole reason for their eviction was due to peer pressure because of their rumored connections to the STFU.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) had formed just two years earlier and was making slow headway in improving he living conditions and income for the sharecroppers and tenant farmers. . Originally, the STFU was formed to protest the eviction of twenty-three farming families on a plantation near Tyronza Ark, but grew in scope to fight generally for the rights of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers. By 1936, the union had spread to Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Missouri.
The STFU responded quickly to the plight of the evicted families from the Dibble farm. Some families were taken to a negro Baptist Church in a nearby community. Some were housed in the church building and the overflow slept beneath crude quilt shelters in the church yard. A union meeting was held at nearby St. Peters Methodist Church in the vicinity of Earle Arkansas. Shortly after the meeting began, it was broken up by deputies who shot two of the sharecroppers, Virgil Ligons and Ed Franklin.
The next afternoon another meeting was held, this time at a neighboring Baptist Church. Howard Kester, one of the founders of the SFTU arrived from Memphis to head up the meeting. An effort had been made to keep the location and time of the meeting a secret, but that effort proved unsuccessful. The meeting had barely begun when a squad of men barged in armed with guns and ax handles. Chaos ensued. Doors were blocked and sharecroppers began breaking windows to make their escape.
Howard Kester was taken from the building a gunpoint, placed in his own car, with two gunmen standing on the running boards. Kester was ordered o drive down a darkended dirt road through a nearby wooded forest and then told to stop. He was pulled from the car as one of the gunmen reached into his coat and pulled out a noose.
Kester pleaded with the assailants, pointing out that any number of union members knew of his presence at the meeting and that his disappearance would certainly generate publicity. The kidnappers realized that Kester was right. Killing a black man would go all but unnoticed but killing a white man wouldn’t go unpunished. They ordered Kester back into the vehicle and ordered him to leave the state at once or face severe beatings or worse. Kester complied.
Meanwhile, other members of he Southern Tenant Farmers Union who had attended the church meeting quickly spread the word of Kester’s kidnapping and word hard reached back to Memphis. Most feared the worst ….that Kester had been killed. Calls had already gone out the press and soon it became a national story. When Kester arrived back in Memphis (much to the relief of his wife), he received numerous telegrams promising aide to the evicted sharecroppers back in Arkansas but those promises were slow to be fulfilled.
The evicted families continued their struggles to survive in the hastily constructed tent colonies. Fortunately, the publicity from the Kester kidnapping had quelled any further violence against the homeless families but the bleak cold winter proved an formidable foe to the families just the same.
What little funds the STFU had in the bank was disbursed to the families but that quickly ran out. STFU organizers in Arkansas began attempts to meet with local and state governmental bodies while Kester began traveling in he northeast to speak on behalf of the evicted families hoping to raise funds for their relief.
By early March, four tent camps remained beside the highway, fully visible to all who passed by, yet seemingly ignored. No solution seemed forthcoming. Local and State leaders in Arkansas had refused to act and other sharecropper evictions soon followed.
Kester had visited Washington DC and discussed the situation with Will Alexander of president Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration. Alexander assured Kester that the federal government would work toward a long-term solution for the sharecroppers but offered no immediate help in the short run. Kester pleaded with Alexander and other officials to put pressure on the state and local officials in Arkansas to began providing aid to the starving families but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Powerful senators from the state depended on the votes of the farm owners for re-election and they worked to forestall any action by WPA administrators for the sharecroppers and their famlies.
The STFU continued telling the stories of the homeless farm families but the depression made it difficult to raise needed funds, even in the more affluent cities of the northeast.
Finally a solution was found.. Missionary evangelist and author Sherwood Eddy and his assistant Rev. Sam Franklin contacted the STFU leaders to discuss a radical and visionary experiment to establish a cooperative farm for displaced sharecroppers. Sherwood Eddy, world traveler, ordained minister, and missionary was a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of America’s most famous intellectuals.
Eddy and Franklinlocated a tract of land in Bolivar County Mississippi which could be used as a resettlement farm. (Eddy purchased the farm in Mississippi rather than Arkansas for reasons of safety.)
Sam Franklin was appointed as the administrator of the farm. Franklin was born in 1902 in Dandridge Tennessee and attended Maryville College in TN before going to McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Sam and his wife Dorothy (also a Tennessee native) has gone to Japan as Presbyterian missionaries in 1929 and returned with a vision for social justice in their southern homeland.
The cooperative farm was organized around four principles:
- efficiency in production and economy in finance through the cooperative principle,
- participation in building a socialized economy of abundance,
- inter-racial justice, and
- realistic religion as a social dynamic.
Agricultural operations at the farm included growing cotton, dairy and beef farms, a pasteurizing plant, and a saw mill. The cooperative also provided a number of social and other services to members and the surrounding communities, including a cooperative store, a credit union, a medical clinic, educational programs, a library, religious services, and summer work camps for students.
Both the STFU and Delta Cooperative Farm are great examples of southern protestants taking radical action in response to the gospel message of the New Testament. We will explore both the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Delta Cooperative Farm in greater detail in the future.
