The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) was founded in 1934 as a civil farmer’s union to organize tenant farmers in the Southern United States.
Since the Reconstruction era the vast majority of Southern farmers were exploited under semi-feudal labor conditions, paying for their land usage with crops, and easily subject to the whims of the white landowners. Their plight was exacerbated by the Great Depression and ironically by a highly touted New Deal reform, the Agricultural Administration Act (AAA). As provisions of the AAA reduced large farmers’ need for laborers, the lives of 1930s sharecroppers and tenant farmers grew more difficult. That they built successful unions, often with help from radical organizations, is one of the most inspiring chapters of African American and labor history.
Originally set up during the Great Depression, the STFU was founded to help sharecroppers and tenant farmers get better arrangements from landowners. They were eager to improve their share of profit or subsidies and working conditions. The STFU was established as a response to policies of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Part of the New Deal, the AAA was a program to reduce production in order to increase prices of commodities; landowners were paid subsidies, which they were supposed to pass on to their tenants. The program was designed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help revive the United States’ agricultural industry and to recharge the depressed economy.
The AAA called for a reduction in food production, which would, through a controlled shortage of food, raise the price for any given food item through supply and demand. The desired effect was that the agricultural industry would prosper due to the increased value and produce more income for farmers. In order to decrease food production, the AAA paid farmers to hold some of their land out of production; the money was paid to the landowners. The landowners were expected to share this money with the tenant farmers. While a small percentage of the landowners did share the income, the majority did not.
The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union was one of few unions in the 1930’s that was open to all races. They promoted non-violent protest to gain their fair share of the AAA money. Originally, the STFU was formed to protest the eviction of twenty-three farming families on a plantation near Tyronza, 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, and at its height in 1938, claimed over 30,000 members in over 300 separate locals. The newspaper, the Sharecroppers’ Voice, described the struggle of the Union and the workers they represented. Throughout its history, the STFU was remarkable among tenant farmers and sharecroppers’ unions in the South for its commitment in theory and in practice to building what was rare for the time and region, a racially integrated union.
They also promoted the goal of blacks and whites working efficiently together. The Farmers’ Union met with harsh resistance from the landowners and local public officials. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union leaders were often harassed, attacked and many were killed. This situation made the STFU far more dependent than Northern industrial unions on outside funding and occasional safe refuge for its organizers.
In the 1930’s the union was active in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas. It later spread into the southeastern states and to California, sometimes affiliating with larger national labor federations. Its headquarters was mainly at Memphis, Tennessee. From 1948 to 1960, it was based at Washington, D.C.. It was later known as the National Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union.
Agriculture in the south never fully recovered since the overproduction of crops during World War I. Additionally, natural disasters in the 1920s and 1930s prepared an agricultural deterioration in southern states. When the Great Depression started, the southern agriculture sector had inherited weak foundations. In order to alleviate this sector, the federal government under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, through the New Deal, started economic incentives to reduce the production output of plantations; thereby, decreasing the number of sharecroppers and farmers needed in the fields.
The implications of the policies from the AAA caused unemployment and the eviction of tenant farmers to raise dramatically. Harry Leland Mitchell, a socialist and sharecropper, and Clay East, a gasoline station owner, saw that the federal subsidies went mainly to the plantation owners and left tenant farmers and sharecroppers unemployed without any aid from the federal government. East and Mitchell created the Unemployed League with other farmers in Tyronza, Arkansas, to fight the local plantation owners’ retention of federal relief payments under the New Deal. The Unemployed League was able to distribute this aid among the land workers of Delta; soon after the league disbanded.
The cause and organization were revived in 1934 when the STFU was created. STFU’s main goal was to advocate for the distribution of New Deal subsidies from plantation owners to tenant farmers. Later on, the leadership of STFU decided to make the union an established collective bargaining organization, similar to the industrial unions in big cities. However, it never reached a formal bargaining position because plantation owners used violence and intimidation against the STFU leadership and its members.