Banner Graphic, Volume 14, Number 167, Greencastle, Putnam County, 21 March 1984 — Page 9

Movement only a memory now

Tenant farmers mark union's anniversary

By WILLIAM SERRIN c. 1984 N.Y. Times MONTGOMERY, Ala. - On the steamy night of July 13, 1934, 18 men, 11 of them white and 7 black, met in a rickety schoolhouse on a cotton plantation near Tyronza, Ark., and formed a bold union, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Among them was a young man, H.L. Mitchell, who had been a sharecropper but was then operating a dry cleaning business. The union never was large, but it had a mighty spirit. It challenged social and economic power in the South and attempted to do what unions still often do not do: organize the poor. On Friday, at the old Statehouse in Little Rock, Ark., near the land where union members were chased, beaten, imprisoned, and where some were killed, 75 to 100 of the people who belonged to the union gathered to mark the 50th anniversary of its founding. Mitchell, 77, still energetic and dedicated, was there. So were the Rev. George Stith, who was one of its most able organizers; Evelyn Smith Munro, long one of the union’s indefatigable workers, and John Handcox, who helped write some of the labor movement’s grandest anthems including “Roll the Union On” and “WeShall Not Be Moved.” The union, often unmentioned in labor histories, was integrated when almost no institutions in America were integrated. It was instrumental in exposing the evils of farm tenancy and the sharecropper system. It criticized New Deal agricultural policies like the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which, the union said, favored large landholders. It was largely responsible for the . establishment of the Federal Farm Security Administration, which, until it was abolished in 1946, fought for the rights of tenant farmers, sharecropp- • pers and small farmers. The rural areas of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas had long nurtured movements like the Farmers

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Members of the Southern Tenant Far- to organize the poor against social and mers Union in the 19305. Integrated at a economic power in the South. (N.Y. Times time when almost no institutions in photo) America were integrated, it boldly sought

Alliance and the People’s Party. In 1927 at the age of 21, Mitchell moved to Tyronza, Ark., from Halls, Tenn. He tried sharecropping, but the land was poor and he took over the dry cleaning store and made friends with Henry Clay East who ran the gas station next door. In 1934 the Socialist Norman Thomas visited Tyronza to investigate the farm tenancy and sharecropper systems. At lunch at East’s house, Thomas suggested Mitchell and East form a tenant farmers’ union. The union received help from many friends: Dr. William R. Amberson, a Memphis physiologist and a Socialist; Howard Kester, a minister and a Socialist; Gardner (Pat) Jackson, a Department of Agriculture official in the early Roosevelt administration and then the union’s Washington representative and Dr. Will W. Alexander, who was administrator of the Farm Security Administration. But Mitchell was always the union’s driving force. Anthony P. Dunbar, author of “Against the Grain,” a study of radical movements in the South, calls Mitchell “one of the

people who give character and quality to the South.” It seemed the union might have great success. By 1937 it had 31,000 members. In 1935, it staged a strike of 5,000 cotton pickers and won wage increases. It organized demonstrations to bring the nation’s attention to the eviction of tenant farmers by landords. “We had people moving, doing things for themselves,” Mitchell says. But a number of forces combined to prevent the union’s success and sap its strength over the next 20 years. There was the opposition of plantation bosses as well as of many in the Roosevelt administration. There was also the breadth of the union’s goals: the replacement of the plantation system with cooperative farms owned by tenants, and a racially integrated organization of the nation’s farm workers. The labor movement also hurt. When the tenant union applied for membership in the new Committee on Industrial Organization in 1937, John L. Lewis, president of the CIO, forced it to affiliate with a new union, the United Cannery Agricultural Packinghouse and

Allied Workers of America. The union withdrew from the cannery workers and the CIO in 1939, but its energy was sapped by struggles with the cannery workers’ Communist leadership. The introduction of new technologies during and after World War II also hurt the union. Land-owners replaced tenants with machines like the gasoline tractor and the mechanical cotton picker. In 1940, the nation had 2.6 million farm workers; today it has less than a million. Mitchell and others worked hard to keep farm unionism going. During World War II the union sent unemployed members to farm jobs in the South, the North and the West. From 1947 to 1949, the union, now called the National Farm Labor Union, conducted a strike of 1,000 workers at the DiGiorgio Farms near Bakersfield, Calif. The company broke the strike, but the strike and subsquent union actions in

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H.L. MITCHELL Union founder

California helped give rise to the United Farm Workers. In 1960, in Mitchell’s words, the union, then known as the National Agricultural Workers Union, was “submerged” into the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union. Mitchell went to work for the meatcutters as an agricultural specialist and helped organize sugar cane workers, fishermen, chicken farmers and dairy farmers. A large, rawboned, whitehaired man, Mitchell lives in Montgomery with his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1940 and who long was the union’s secretary-treasurer. Looking back, Mitchell said John L. Lewis was a ’’business unionist whose interest was in getting a huge membership that could pay union dues.” He said Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s secretary of Agriculture, “favored the planters and cared nothing for the sharecroppers.” He said President Roosevelt “was a real good politician, but of the two Roosevelts, I’d take Eleanor.” “We were never just a union,” Mitchell said. “We were a movement. We tried to make it a union, but we didn’t do so good at that.”

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