"Out Yonder on the Road": Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri
This essay revisits the 1939 roadside demonstration of sharecroppers in southeast Missouri, when more than fifteen hundred men, women, and children piled their belongings on the highway shoulder to protest the deleterious effects of New Deal agricultural policy. Images of these impoverished, desperate families — African American and white — shocked the nation and attracted the attention of the White House. Using archival material, including documentary photographs, the essay excavates the longer history of this dramatic event and considers how the demonstrators successfully manipulated the cultural narratives and iconography of rural poverty to force government action. These grassroots, working-class activists participated in what scholars have termed the 1930s "Southern Front" of political protest.
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Bruce Moses, Missouri Bootheel map, 2009.
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"'Out Yonder on the Road': Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri" was selected for the 2009 Southern Spaces series "Documentary Expression and the American South," a collection of innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship about documentary work and original documentary projects that engage with regions and places in the U.S. South.
Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002967-M4.
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As day broke, word began to spread across the Missouri Bootheel and surrounding area that something was happening on the roadsides. Locals did not know what, exactly, but soon suspected that it had to do with the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), which had been organizing tenants in the area since 1936. Within a few hours, print and radio journalists rushed to cover the story. Soon, investigators, including those from the federal government's National Youth Administration, arrived to interview the demonstrators, talk with local planters, and struggle to comprehend what they saw and heard. When journalists asked William H. Jones, leader of the camp near Sikeston, what it was all about, he replied that after having been turned out of their homes by unscrupulous landlords, "We have no place to go." "We don't know whether this will do us any good," Jones concluded, "but it will show the people what we are up against."2
How did people interpret it? Photographers from major daily newspapers in St. Louis and Memphis, from the Associated Press (AP), from the Historical Section of the government's Farm Security Administration (FSA), and others working on a freelance basis compiled a voluminous photographic record of what Jones and his fellow protestors showed on the roadsides. These photographs accompanied nearly every news report of the event. To be sure, the photographers offered their own compositional interpretations of what the protest meant. Many of the AP photographs minimized and sometimes erased the role played by African Americans, while others shot the scene at a distance in a way that portrayed the individual actors on the roadsides as a faceless human detritus left in the wake of some omnipotent force. By contrast, the pictures taken by Arthur Rothstein, an FSA photographer coincidentally on assignment in the Bootheel at the time, focused on the black participants, who emerged in his rendering "as social actors rather than simply figures acted upon, and as thinkers rather than simply figures thought about," according to historian Nicholas Natanson. What is most striking about Rothstein's images, Natanson concluded, is that "the activism that spawned the demonstration in the first place" was apparent to those who looked.3
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Rothstein, Arthur, Evicted sharecropper and child, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002945-M2
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Arthur Rothstein, State highway officials moving sharecroppers away from roadside to area between the levee and the Mississippi River, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002975-M2.
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And they succeeded. The visual narrative of the protest attracted attention all the way to the White House. On January 31, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about the demonstrators' plight in her nationally syndicated "My Day" newspaper column. She worried for the "women and children" in the camps and hoped that concerned people would make "sure that as much suffering as possible is being alleviated." More importantly, President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded that "this situation, serious as it is for the individual families . . . is even more serious as a symptom of the widespread situation existing throughout the South." He instructed Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in a private memorandum to "do everything within our power to assist the families of the sharecroppers, farm tenants and farm laborers in southern Missouri who 'went out on the road.'"7
The story of how the demonstrators "went out on the road" begins two years before with the Mississippi River flood of 1937. On January 21 that year, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would deliberately breach the levee that protected the richest cotton land in the Missouri Bootheel in order to relieve pressure on the levees guarding the city of Cairo, Illinois. The threatened stretch of Mississippi County had been cordoned off by a sixty-foot high setback levee following the disastrous flood of 1927. The setback levee created a flood zone that could provide the river an outlet if waters rose again. When the army announced that it would use the spillway, it gave the twelve thousand tenants and sharecroppers who made up ninety-five percent of those who lived there three days notice to rescue household goods, tools, and livestock. On January 25, the Corps dynamited a gaping hole in the riverfront levee, rattling windows in Charleston, twelve miles to the west, and sending a cascade of muddy, icy floodwater across the land.8
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Walker Evans, Sand bags augment the Bessis Levee during the 1937 flood, near Tiptonville, Tennessee, February 1937. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 009234-M1.
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Others saw the contradictions too. The Resettlement Administration dispatched photographer Russell Lee to document the assistance it provided to those in the camps. The agency employed photographers to gather material for its various public relations campaigns, which included the "exposure of the ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed in need of agency assistance; documentation of RA/FSA accomplishments in rural rehabilitation and resettlement; [and the] exploration of social, economic, and cultural processes" in lesser-known parts of the country.11 Lee's photographs accompanied the Resettlement Administration's claims of how much it could help these people when they returned to their homes, a resettlement program that included loans for seed, tools, and new home construction, as well as public health services and educational outreach programs.
Russell Lee, Negro flood refugees at meal time, Charleston, Missouri, February 1937. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF34- 010215-D.
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News of the government's plan attracted more people to the local STFU groups, including those in the NAACP who abandoned their organization in favor of union membership, as well as hundreds of white people who decided after much hesitation to join with their African American counterparts in order to ensure their access to what seemed like the government's direct response to STFU demands. That summer the STFU attracted even more members, white and black, when it affiliated with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a new umbrella union of agricultural and food workers in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The alliance with the CIO, a strong, broad-based industrial union that had just won stunning victories for steel and automotive workers, magnified rural people's hopes in the power of the STFU to achieve something. The CIO's "culture of unity" that encouraged black and white workers to cooperate together in order to maximize their collective political power also helped bring African Americans and whites into closer cooperation in the union. By the end of 1937, the STFU claimed twenty-seven locals in the Bootheel with over two thousand paying members reflecting ten-fold growth in less than a year.12
Map of STFU and NAACP group sites in the Missouri Bootheel by late 1937
Map by Bruce Moses, 2009 Also indicates Highways 60 and 61 and the location of the spillway. (larger version) |
In July reports emerged in Missouri of a large round of evictions planned for the beginning of 1939. Local members of the STFU called for the union to intercede. "I am writing you to let you no we are expected to be out of doors the first of the year," one Mississippi County sharecropper told STFU official J. R. Butler. "If you have any influence with the President," he pleaded, "I wish you would please get him to do something for us."14
Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002926-M3
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Desperate to prevent the planned evictions, local union leader Owen Whitfield sought a means of resistance that would circumvent the authority of local planters. Any such solution, he realized, would have to come from the federal government and would thus require a dramatic display of need. "The union must fight through the government," he argued to fellow STFU leaders.16 Whitfield planned a "speaking and organizing campaign getting the people in readiness for a drive on the federal government." His goal was to force the FSA to build more "homesteading projects" in the area like the recently-opened LaForge Farms.
LaForge housed one hundred families on FSA-owned land, which it rented to clients at reasonable rates. It provided new single-family homes, communal meeting and recreational rooms, and facilities for co-operative business enterprises. Whitfield and his family managed to secure a place on the project through his union connections and he believed the program offered a model solution to the crisis in the cotton country. He informed officials with the St. Louis Urban League that he wanted to see that the thousands of people being evicted got "back to the soil where they belong and they so desire to be." Since so many of the displaced were moving to southern and northern cities, Whitfield thought it imperative to "carry the fight into St. Louis and other northern cities" with a "speaking tour and put the plight of these homeless people before the nation."17
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Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002929-M3.
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As the end of 1938 approached, Whitfield worked hard to win outside support for the planned demonstration from a range of organizations, including the STFU, CIO, and the St. Louis Urban League. Whitfield informed national STFU leaders that the Bootheel locals were busy "trying to prepare ourselves for what will happen on the first of January" when "about 900 union familys will be evicted." "They are planning to pile their household goods on sides of the highway and see what happens," he revealed.20
A front page article in the Post-Dispatch the following morning told the story. Amid resounding prayers and hymns, Whitfield described the upcoming demonstration using the Apostle Luke's rendering of Christ's final journey to Jerusalem. Quoting Luke 9:58, he said: "The foxes have holes and the birds of heaven have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." We can read two aims in Whitfield's choice of scripture. On the one hand, the choice of text reminded his followers about the difficulties of discipleship: their suffering was righteous, just as Christ's suffering brought redemption. On the other hand, his sermon attempted to place the protestors on the moral high ground by linking the images of them on the roadsides that would follow in the press to the well-known Biblical story about how the Samaritans rejected Christ and his disciples during their trip to Jerusalem. Like the Son of Man, they also had no place to lay their heads. But would Americans in 1939 behave like most of the Samaritans had done and turn them away? Or would Americans respond like the Good Samaritan? "How many of you got a notice to move?" Whitfield asked. Hands shot up. "How many have got a place to go?" The room went silent. "That's why we're here," he thundered, to "bear our burdens together."
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Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002919-M3.
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The story had impact, though, as federal agencies rushed officials to the Bootheel. While content/ to let their ragged appearance speak for itself in their interaction with reporters, the demonstrators now articulated clear demands to government agents. Over 90 percent of those questioned wanted to continue farming; most were eager to return to sharecropping or renting.26 Melvin Smith and his wife wanted to rent or buy a farm so their family wouldn't "have to move all over the country." Peter Wilderness said he wanted "to stay on a farm in this vicinity." Walter Johnson, of Deventer, wanted to rent or buy a farm in Missouri, because, he explained, "I'm really a farmer, a renter." Others wanted access to good land and the right to raise subsistence foodstuffs that would allow them to better provide for their families. Ike Tripp would move anywhere in the area where he could "make an honest support for my family and won't have to be moving so much." Daniel McClenton and his wife, protesting with their ten children, were content/ to sharecrop if they could raise their own corn and chickens. Alonzo Julian wanted to farm "any good place" with good land.27
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Arthur Rothstein, Wife of evicted sharecropper, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002943-M1.
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Just as then, the demonstrators did not want charity, but the opportunity for the rightful rewards of productive work. "Give me a hand," Moore requested, "and I will make my living like other men." They needed federal help, he explained, because they were "in need of every thing [:] house, more land, food, clothing, and other things."34 Irene Nickerson concurred, saying that, "We don't want relief [;] we want to work and make our own living."35 While the visual image of the desperate protestors increased public debate about what should or could be done to help, the demonstrators themselves gave the federal government clear guidance as to what they wanted done.
Their demands played to the populist politics of the New Deal. The protestors wanted livelihoods that matched their willingness to work hard. They wanted the opportunity to have their own farms. Arthur Rothstein, the FSA photographer who covered theprotest (he was in the Bootheel to document successes at LaForge), helped to place the demonstration within this cultural narrative with the photographs he took of individual families on the roadsides. In sharp contrast to the distant images of worn-out poor people, these close-up shots showed strong, healthy farmers whose lack of land was rendered absurd against the bleak winter landscape.36 How could these robust American farmers be kept from working?
These images were so effective, in part, because they hid the political movement that generated the protest. Had the involvement of the STFU, CIO, and NAACP been clear to distant viewers the demonstrators could have expected far less sympathy. Local authorities, however, knew more about the organizational history of the roadside camps than more casual observers and worked hard to discredit the affair, claiming that it was the result of outside agitation. "C.I.O. INCITES SHARECROPPER STRIKE," led the Charleston Enterprise Courier on January 12. "Very few of the campers know why they are camping along the highways," the editor claimed. "A lot of folks along the highways have listened to glib tongued orators who promised much" but could not "deliver the goods."37
From the morning of January 10 to the morning of January 14, however, the protest worked according to plan. The roadside camps attracted immediate federal attention and gained the sympathy of the Roosevelts. What is more, the demonstration caught local planters and state officials unawares. Now in St. Louis, Whitfield planned an ambitious nationwide speaking tour to raise money and support for the demonstrators.
The publicity of poverty had worked well for the demonstrators, but now the state of Missouri aimed to use their exposure against them. After a tour of the camps on January 13, Harry Parker, the State Health Commissioner, declared the camps a "menace to public health" because they lacked clean water and sanitary toilets. The condition of the camps gave the authorities a seemingly non-political reason to halt the protest. Anyone who saw the photographs in the newspaper could see the unhealthy conditions — that was the point. Parker instructed Colonel B. M. Casteel of the Highway Patrol to remove the camps at once before epidemic disease broke out in "a state-wide and national health menace." If Casteel could not find homes for the people, he ordered, they should be placed "in concentration camps" where they could be immunized and vaccinated.38 "I don't know where we would put them," Casteel told reporters, "but if they threaten public health they must be moved somewhere."39
As the state police demolished the camps on January 14 and 15, the visual battle neared an end. At first it seemed that the removal might backfire on the authorities, since many photographers, including Rothstein, were on hand to document it. Their images showed impoverished people being coerced by state power. A few of Rothstein's shots even included a cigar-chomping, pot-bellied, jack-boot wearing patrolman more akin to caricatures of police brutality than to portrayals of law and order.40
Arthur Rothstein, State highway officials moving evicted sharecroppers away from roadside to area between the levee and the Mississippi River, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002932-M2.
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Horrified by the removal, President Roosevelt nevertheless ordered local Surplus Commodities depots to make all food supplies immediately available to those in the Homeless Junction camp. In addition, the FSA, at Roosevelt's urging, announced it would deliver tents to the camp. Crucially, the FSA also started issuing emergency cash grants to the demonstrators and processing their applications for relocation loans.43
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Arthur Rothstein, New Madrid spillway, where evicted sharecroppers were moved from highway, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002956-M4.
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Although the demonstrators continued to agitate for the rest of the year, they did so out of public view. With the visual struggle stalled, their union allies began to lobby on their behalf. In mid-December 1939, the FSA announced a new "five-point" plan to address the crisis; it consisted mainly of programs to increase affordable loans and emergency grants. But it also included a radical proposal for two rehabilitation housing schemes.45 The FSA plan did not offer land to the landless or even secure housing for very many, but it was a start. Missouri Governor Lloyd Stark endorsed the proposal in the hopes of avoiding any more trouble. In order to negotiate an orderly resolution, in early January 1940 he convened a conference in St. Louis with representatives from the FSA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Missouri Employment Service; two Bootheel planters; and Whitfield.46
Authur, Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002927-M1.
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This influx of federal support culminated in June when the FSA unveiled plans for Delmo Security Homes. Initially, the plan called for the construction of over five hundred homes in eight settlements across the Bootheel for the neediest displaced families. Small plots of land for a garden accompanied each home and the settlements included community washing, toilet, and meeting facilities. "The Delmo Homes are located in the heart of the cotton area," the FSA explained, "where the residents can obtain cash income for cotton chopping and cotton picking, to supplement home products produced on their tracts."49 Although the Delmo Homes provided good housing, sanitary conditions, and social spaces, the program did not provide land or aim to help the people who lived there become landowners, as the LaForge settlement had done and many of the demonstrators hoped would happen in response to their protest. Delmo would help displaced families become self-supporting wage workers who enjoyed decent living conditions, nothing more.
The FSA finished the construction of the Delmo Homes in January 1941. In final form, the project provided over six hundred single-family homes for landless farmers in nine separate settlements, at least one in every Bootheel county. The settlements were segregated with six reserved for white families, and three for African American families. Although African Americans had led the roadside demonstration, as well as the negotiations with the FSA and the state of Missouri, they took a back seat when it came to apportioning places in the settlement. They had won a victory with the FSA, but not one against racism in the New Deal. Because of the poverty and the casual employment of its clients, the FSA charged each family a low monthly rent of $3. More than just the fate of these families rested on Delmo's gleaming white cottages. "If group labor projects in this district are successful," FSA regional director Phillip G. Beck observed, "the program will be extended throughout the South."50
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John Vachon, Group labor homes, Grayridge, New Madrid County, Missouri, November 1940, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF34- 061862-D.
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Although they no longer harbored ambitions to become landowners, Delmo clients were well-placed to exploit the changing southern agricultural economy. "Today," the FSA concluded in December 1940, "farming in Southeast Missouri is rapidly being mechanized." Farms now "operate on a factory basis," it reported, "employing only a few tractor drivers for most of the year, but depending on large numbers of day laborers for a few months in cotton-chopping and picking seasons."52 In 1941, one family on the Kennett project left the Bootheel after the close of cotton-chopping season to pick strawberries in southern Illinois and Indiana before returning. Near the end of summer, they went back to Illinois to pick peaches with several other wage hands who had paid to ride along in their truck. They all returned to Dunklin County in time for cotton picking. Local FSA administrators considered them one of the most financially secure wage working families in southeast Missouri, and perhaps anywhere in the South. "The head of the family," Phillip G. Beck reported, "stated that the fact that he lived in the Farm Security Administration group labor home community gave him a feeling of security and encouraged him to seek migratory farm work."53 The lives and labors of migratory farmers were far from ideal (the family that Beck described was exceptional in many ways), but the condition of those who lived at Delmo was dramatically better than the image presented on the roadsides in January 1939.
The FSA program attracted powerful enemies. In 1943, local congressman Orville Zimmerman, a Kennett, Missouri, native, sat on a select committee in the House of Representatives to investigate the activities of the FSA. The agency, he said, was driven by a communistic intent to "go out and lease all of the land in the United States and have these associations created so that you will have these men in these houses and the Farm Security will be one gigantic supervising agency over all the land in the United States." One had to look no further than the Delmo Homes, which, he claimed, was infested with union agitators. To ensure the domination of "certain social leaders," Zimmerman continued, the FSA made the projects a "mecca for these organizers that come in and cause confusion in the community." These same agitators, he claimed had been behind the subversive "crusade" on the roadsides which had drawn "reporters in there from all over the United States," many of whom "wrote some of the darnedest stories that were ever printed." To him the image of rural poverty as conjured during the roadside demonstration had been "a perversion of the real situation in southeast Missouri."54
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Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002927-M5.
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By early 1945, with the war in Europe drawing to a close, Delmo's enemies began their final offensive. In January the WFA declared that it no longer needed the communities for its wartime program and shifted them back to the FSA, which was now under the control of the very politicians seeking to destroy it. Frank Hancock, the new FSA Director, claimed that Delmo was unprofitable and that ample housing existed for farm workers elsewhere. In March the FSA announced it would liquidate the projects altogether by private auction, as well as sub-contract the Health Service to Blue Cross, a private medical insurer.56
Activists in the Delmo communities launched a furious campaign to stop the privatization process. The first petition of the Tenants Committee, signed by members of all 606 client families, protested "the sale of our rental homes and lands at public auction." They thanked the FSA and WFA for helping them secure and enjoy "liberty, good housing, and the benefits of community life." If, however, the homes were sold, they warned, all of this would be lost and "we will be homeless or living in old shacks, and we will once again face the future without hope." Many vowed to leave the Bootheel and farming for good if their homes were sold. "We won't go back to the plantations," one black resident declared, "no matter what. Where will I go, you ask? Well someplace," he concluded, "up North, East or West, but I won't stay here." Another resident invoked memories of the roadside demonstrations that had forced the creation of Delmo in the first place, saying that if they were forced out "it's going to be out yonder on the road — another highway demonstration."57
Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002923-M5.
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With outside financial and political support, the Delmo residents successfully purchased all but one of the settlements for $285,000. The purchase included houses, lots, household furnishings, community buildings, and roads within community borders, but not the adjoining land. Contributions from sympathetic donors covered most of the $73,000 down payment, including $12,500 donated by Marshall Field, $4,500 by the STFU's National Sharecroppers Fund, and $1,000 by the NAACP. Each family paid $800 for their share, to be repaid in affordable monthly payments of $7.50 for eight years.59 For once, the remaining residents contemplated a future with some security, dignity, and autonomy. Their homes, which still stand along the side streets of otherwise nondescript Missouri towns like Delmo, North Lilbourn, and Homestown offer a lasting, visible reminder of the movement for justice in the fields.
The visual text that they created through their protest — captured and transmitted by photographers and journalists to readers across the country and internationally — used the cultural ferment of the New Deal years, particularly the recent "discovery" of southern poverty by artists, writers, and photographers, to frame a set of political demands that were for the most part successfully achieved. They did this, moreover, in the face of local hostility and official repression. As union leader Owen Whitfield had explained in late 1937: "No one knows our condition as we ourselves know it. We are compelled to cry out."60 And cry out they did, in images that moved the President of the United States to act on their behalf. Although the outcome was then still uncertain, Whitfield reassured the protestors in February 1939 that the art of making Roosevelt and others see was "the biggest fight you ever fought in your life and you have won."61
1. "Sharecroppers Evicted, Camp Along Highways," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939; "Sharecroppers in Mass Move; Appeal to Federal Officials," Sikeston Standard, January 13, 1939; "Army of Sharecroppers Trek From Homes; Protest Missouri Landlords' Wage Plans," New York Times, January 11, 1939; Herbert Little to Aubrey Williams, January 16, 1939, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter FDR); Colonel B.M. Casteel to Governor Lloyd Stark, January 20, 1939, Folder 1959, Papers of Governor Lloyd Stark, C0004, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia (hereafter Stark Papers, WHMC).
2. "Sharecroppers Evicted, Camp Along Highways," Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939.
3. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 3-4, 113-26 (quotes p. 126).
4. See, for example, Stuart Kidd, "Dissonant Encounters: FSA Photographers and the Southern Underclass, 1935-1943," in Richard Godden and Martin Crawford, eds., Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 26-30 (quote p. 30); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 267-89; James Curtis, Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), viii-ix; Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 1-84, 113-41; John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 148-49; and Michael L. Carlebach, "Documentary and Propaganda: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration," The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 8 (Spring 1988): 6-13.
5. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Imagination," Journal of Southern History 69 (February 2003): 7 (first quote); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 329 (second quote).
6. Curiously, there are few extended historical studies of the 1939 roadside demonstration. Most of these focus on the role the affair played in the clash and ultimate split between the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations rather than the understandings and motivations of the hundreds of protestors themselves. The demonstration itself did play a role in that fracas, but the political battle that ensued between the two unions had very little to do with what brought the demonstrators to the roadsides in the first place or what their demonstration has to say about rural working-class activism in the 1930s, its aims, and its links to an older organizing tradition that predated both the STFU and the CIO. For an excellent overview, and still the only book-length treatment, of the protest, see Louis Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969). Donald Grubbs described the demonstration as "a tri-cornered circus featuring" the two unions and the planters with Owen Whitfield as the "ringmaster." See Donald Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 180-81. For an approach that looks at the demonstration from the perspective of those on the roadsides and also within a longer historical context, see Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), esp. 132-72.
7. Eleanor Roosevelt, "My Day," January 31, 1939 (first quote), syndicated newspaper column, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ (accessed February 2010); President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, January 19, 1939 (second quote), Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR; Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1942), 290.
8. See John Handcox, Charleston, to H. L. Mitchell, February 8, 1937, and "Minutes of the Refugees of STFU CC," February 15, 1937, both on Reel 4, Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Papers, 1934-1970 (Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1971), 60 reels microfilm (hereafter STFU Papers). Slightly more than 7,000 of those displaced from the spillway were black. See Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 106.
9. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 232; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 44. There were six STFU locals with more than 200 total members and a large NAACP chapter with over sixty members in the area at the end of 1936. On the early 1930s organizing history in the Missouri Bootheel, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 76-102.
10. Wright, Old South, New South, 226-32; Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 92-101.
11. Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 4 (quote).
12. For more on the details of this organizing drive, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 103-31. These demands had been mentioned by the STFU in some way or another since it was founded in 1934 but had given way to the union's main campaign against the injustices of the AAA. Local activists in southeast Missouri brought this more comprehensive set of objectives back to the fore following the flood crisis of 1937. In this they made a partial break from the STFU's national leadership which was based in Memphis. This break included demands by local farmers for future security on individual farms, not the collective farms proposed by the union's socialist leadership. For more information on the differences between local activism and the union's stated aims, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 76-131. For more on the STFU's national stance, see Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, 30-107. For more on the STFU's efforts to prompt FSA programs, see David Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965); and Donald Holley, Uncle Sam's Farmers: The New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). Race relations were tense in the Missouri Bootheel where over the preceding years both white and black farmers had organized into movements defined strictly by race, including Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, the National Federation of Colored Farmers, white supremacist socialist groups, and the Ku Klux Klan. See Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 27-95.
13. Margaret L. Bright, "Farm Wage Workers in Four Southeast Missouri Cotton-Producing Counties" (master's thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1944), 50, 61; Charles F. Hoffman and Virgil L. Bankson, "Crisis in Missouri's Boot Heel," Land Policy Review 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1940): 4-5; Daniel, Breaking the Land, 170-75. For the economic shape of rural re-development in the Bootheel, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 116, 161.
14. Lewis Adams, East Prairie, to J. R. Butler, August 24, 1938, Reel 8, STFU Papers.
15. "CIO Cotton Pickers Strike at Charleston," Sikeston Standard, September 27, 1938; "Cotton Strike Apparently Near the End," Charleston Enterprise-Courier, September 29, 1938; "The Sharecroppers' Demonstration," c. 1939, Folder 48, Box FC 2.3, Newspaper Clippings Collection, 1871-2001, Special Collection and Archive, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau (hereafter SEMO). For the STFU membership in Missouri, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 125.
16. Owen Whitfield, "Minutes of the National Executive Council meeting of the STFU," September 16-17, 1938, quoted in Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 35.
17. Whitfield to John T. Clark, St. Louis Urban League, August 3, 1938 (all quotes), Folder 15, Box 7, Series I, Fannie Frank Cook Papers, Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, St. Louis.
18. Whitfield, interview by Howard Emerson, March 1963, quoted in Howard Emerson, "Sharecropper's Strike, 1939" (Senior honors thesis, Southeast Missouri State University, 1963), 41; "Investigation Concerning the Sharecropper Situation Existing in Southeast Missouri," February 1939, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Washington, 1939), 22-24 (hereafter FBI Report).
19. Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 57-58; Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 128-31.
20. Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, December 1, 1938 (quotes), and Josephine Johnson, St. Louis, to H. L. Mitchell, December 21, 1938, both on Reel 9, STFU Papers; Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 54-55.
21. Cedric Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," Harper's Magazine 197 (November 1948): 100; Bonnie Stepenoff, Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 90; FBI Report, 25.
22. "Sharecroppers, Ordered Evicted, to Camp on Road," Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1939; Whitfield, interview by Howard Emerson, quoted in Emerson, "Sharecroppers' Strike," 41-43; Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 94-95; Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 60-61.
23. See various reports in the Post-Dispatch, January 10-13, 1939; Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 115-17.
24. "Sharecroppers Evicted, Camp Along Highways," Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939.
25. Kidd, "Dissonant Encounters," 26.
26. See cases No. 1-16, 32-102, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
27. Case No. 76 (Melvin Smith), Case No. 14 (Peter Wilderness), Case No. 101 (Walter Johnson), Case No. 72 (Ike Tripp), Case No. 41 (Daniel McClenton), Case No. 7 (Alonzo Julian), all in Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
28. Aubrey Williams to FDR, January 19, 1939, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
29. Craig Winfrey to Governor Stark, January 11, 1939, Folder 1958, Stark Papers, WHMC.
30. Case No. 51 (Dave Coffey), Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
31. "Stories Told by Sharecroppers Camped on Cold Highways," Daily American Republic, ca. January 1939, Folder 48, Box FC 2.3, Newspaper Clippings Collection, 1871-2001, SEMO.
32. Alonzo J. Julien, New Madrid, "Letters Written on Backs of Survey Blanks," ca. January 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
33. Colonel Casteel to Governor Stark, January 20, 1939, Folder 1959, Stark Papers, WHMC.
34. Elijah Moore, Canalou, "Letters Written on Backs of Survey Blanks," ca. January 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
35. Irene Nickerson, Portageville, "Letters Written on Backs of Survey Blanks," ca. January 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
36. Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 115-16, 126, 136-38; Kidd, "Dissonant Encounters," 26-27; "Evicted Sharecroppers????" Enterprise Courier, January 12, 1939.
37. Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 142-50.
38. Harry F. Parker to Governor Stark, January 19, 1939, Folder 1938, Stark Papers, WHMC.
39. "Move to End Trek by Sharecroppers," New York Times, January 14, 1939.
40. Herbert Little to Aubrey Williams, January 16, 1939, and FDR to Henry Wallace, January 19, 1939, both in Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
41. Clark, interview by H. L. Mitchell, quoted in H. L. Mitchell, "1939 Highway Sitdown," Rural Revolt in Missouri, SL 427, WHMC, St. Louis, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
42. FDR to Henry Wallace, January 19, 1939, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
43. "Police Move 500 Share-Croppers into Swamp Area," Post-Dispatch, January 16, 1939; "Sheriff Disarms Sharecroppers Near New Madrid," Post-Dispatch, January 17, 1939; FDR to Wallace, January 19, 1939, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR; Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 89-90.
44. "Sharecropper Campers Forced to Move Again," Post-Dispatch, January 19, 1939; "Sharecroppers Moved with U.S. Tents on the Way," Post-Dispatch, January 20, 1939; Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 89-90.
45. Will Alexander to Eleanor Roosevelt, November 29, 1939, Folder "WW Alexander, September-December 1939," Box 328, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDR; STFU Memorandum to FSA, November 30, 1939, Reel 13, STFU Papers.
46. "Press Release," Governor Stark, December 29, 1939, Folder 1941, Stark Papers, WHMC; Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 134-36.
47. "Sharecropper Handbill," "Drafts: Roadside Demonstration," Folder 32, Thad Snow Papers, SL 88, WHMC, St. Louis.
48. FSA, "Southeast Missouri: A Laboratory for the Cotton South," (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1940), 5-8; "Tract of 2650 Acres Leased by FSA," Enterprise-Courier, February 15, 1940; "New FSA Plan for Semo Farmers Gets Under Way," Enterprise-Courier, March 7, 1940; P.G. Beck, memorandum, May 9, 1940, Folder 1954, Stark Papers, WHMC.
49. "Release on Eight Groups," June 17, 1940, Folder 1954, Stark Papers, WHMC.
50. "Release on Eight Groups," June 17, 1940, Folder 1954, Stark Papers, WHMC; P.G. Beck to C.B. Baldwin, February 11, 1941, Box 414, Missouri, Entry 4A, Records of the Farmers Homes Administration and Predecessor Agencies, RG 96, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA); McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land, 293-94.
51. Michael R. Grey, New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 113-28; FSA, "A Laboratory for the Cotton South," 1.
52. FSA, "A Laboratory for the Cotton South," 1.
53. P. G. Beck testimony, quoted in U.S. Congress, Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, 77th Congress, First Session, Part 23, St. Louis, November 26-27, 1941 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1942), 9244-45.
54. Orville Zimmerman testimony, quoted in U.S. Congress, Hearings Before the Select Committee of the House Committee on Agriculture, to Investigate the Farm Security Administration, HR, 78th Congress, First Session (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), 527, 687, 691-93, 701-02, 708.
55. Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 173-74; Grey, New Deal Medicine, 128.
56. W. Wilder Towle, "Delmo Saga," 2, Folder 5, Bootheel Project Records, 1993-1997, C3928, WHMC.
57. W. Wilder Towle, "Delmo Saga," 2, 20-21, Folder 5, Bootheel Project Records, 1993-1997, C3928, WHMC.
58. "Report of the Washington Delegation," April 1945, and North Lilbourn Tenant Council to the Congress of the United States, April 4, 1945, both on Reel 29, STFU Papers.
59. Charles C. Wilson, St. Louis, to Friends, November 16, 1945, Reel 31, STFU Papers; "Delmo Housing Committee Contributions," Folder 88, David Burgess Papers, The Green Rising, 1910-1977: Supplement to the Papers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1978), 17 reels microfilm; Emerson, "Sharecropper Strike," 83-84.
60. "Negro Sharecropper Who Made Trip to Washington Gives His Opinion on Problem Confronting Semo District," Enterprise-Courier, December 23, 1937.
61. Whitfield, New York, to All Locals in Missouri, February 5, 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
Print Materials:
Cantor, Louis. A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939. Durham: Duke University Press, 1969.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1997.
Godden, Richard and Martin Crawford, eds. Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Imagination." Journal of Southern History 69 (February 2003): 3-38.
Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
Roll, Jarod. Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Links and Online Publications:
"America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945," Library of Congress.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
Dodson, Heidi. "African American History in the Bootheel." University of Illinois.
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/hdodson2/www/index.html
Mitchell, Steve. "Homeless, Homeless are we . . . " Preservation Issues online. Volume 3(1).
http://law.wustl.edu/staff/taylor/preserv/v3n1/homeless.htm
Oh Freedom After While: The Missouri Sharecroppers Strike of 1939. Stephen John Ross, director. California Newsreel, 1999. 56 minutes.
http://newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0064
Parker, Paul E. "A Portrait of Missouri, 1935-1943." University of Missouri Press online. 2002.
http://press.umsystem.edu/fall2002/parker.htm