The union wrote many letters protesting the eviction of hundreds of farmers. The STFU sent five men to Washington to carry out an appeal to the Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. Two African Americans, E.B. McKinney and N.W. Webb, were chosen to go to Washington to denounce the continual eviction of tenant farmers.
The first strike of the STFU was in 1935. Cotton pickers were demanding a better pay rate. Cotton planters wanted to pay forty cents per one-hundred pounds that fall season of 1935 but the union, under H.L. Mitchell’s direction, demanded one dollar. After a few days of the strike, many cotton plantations offered seventy-five cents and fewer offered a dollar. This marked the union’s first victory.
In 1939 STFU activists organized protests by hundreds of cotton sharecroppers in the Bootheel district of southeastern Missouri, alleging there were mass evictions of tenants by landlords who did not wish to share federal AAA checks with them. The Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency, responded by providing low-cost rental housing for 500 cropper families. In 1939 they paid $500,000 in grants to 11,000 families in the Bootheel. The protest fizzled out as Communist and Socialist elements battled for control and STFU membership plunged.
During World War II, the STFU leadership recommended its members find work outside of the plantation fields of Arkansas. They set up an “underground railroad” to transport more than 10,000 workers to jobs in the northern and eastern regions of the United States.
After World War II, the SFTU changed their name to the National Farm Labor Union and were chartered by the American Federation of Labor. From these changes, the organization began operating in California. In this state the NFLU was involved in the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation strike of 1947. After a year and a half on strike, the union succeeded in improving conditions for its workers. The union organized 30,000 men and women to coordinate a strike in Corcoran, California. The strike was to fight against wage cuts for cotton pickers. The strike succeeded in regaining or increasing the workers’ wages.
When the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) created its agricultural affiliate, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), the STFU saw an opportunity to become stronger and joined them. However, due to the fear that UCAPAWA communist leadership might take over STFU, and that UCAPAWA practices might break the racial alliance between blacks and white in the STFU, the STFU resolved to leave the CIO in 1939.
The Communist party by 1934 was willing to form alliances with progressives and socialists. It begun to assist agricultural workers to allied various organizations from the south in order to create a stronger Popular Front. The STFU was among many unions to take part in this Popular Front. The STFU benefited from its association with the communist party because the organizations supported each other in protests and fights against plantation owners. Not every member of the STFU belonged to a communist party. Relatively few members considered themselves communist; the rest belonged to many different political parties or ideologies.
The STFU was not entirely comfortable in its alliance with the Communist party. Many problems between the STFU and the Communist party (such as mismanagement of funds, lack of financial support from the party delaying the union’s mission, conflict of interests between both organizations, and minimal interest of the communist party toward STFU members) broke the alliance. By separating themselves from the Communist party, the union maintained its alliance between white and black workers and members, which was crucial to its identity and program.
Federal relief enacted by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was distributed mainly to plantation owners. The AAA was a New Deal program that was supposed to reduce food production and increase food prices; this was intended to improve the agricultural economy. Once again, Mitchell, East, and liberal members of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration observed that this program had negative effects on land workers, leaving many unemployed. Therefore, they created and became the leaders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) to fight this maldistribution.
Leaders of the union decided to organize a rank and file leadership due to the pressure of its members. The union soon discovered that a rank and file leadership was difficult to organize. Some farm worker wanted to transform the union into a fascist militant group and others wanted to run the union like a corporation; but as the union membership increased, land worker leadership also improved.
The first chapters of the STFU did not go through racial tensions since blacks and white lived and worked closely. However, when the STFU reached large towns, racial antagonisms were prominent since interracial relations were less frequent in this highly populated regions. In these towns the STFU created black and white localities, with their racially respective organizers to gain confidence from their union members. The union sent white organizers to the localities composed of white people. Similarly, the union sent African-Americans to localities composed of African-Americans. E. B. McKinney was an organizer and the first African American to become vice president of the union. Before becoming vice president of the Union he was an active participator in the Socialist party along with Clay East. Owen Whitfield was another African-American leader associated with the STFU.
Even though racial antagonisms were deeply rooted in the South, the STFU was able to create interracial cooperation within the union. In Marked Tree, Arkansas, the African-American locality invited the white locality to their meeting. In this meeting white and blacks sat in the same room and worked for a common purpose. This lead Mitchell to believe that the creation of a racially united movement was possible in other regions. Indeed, most of the important union events and meetings took place in interracial settings.
Even though Mitchell wanted an interracial union, he observed drastic behavioral differences between blacks and whites. African-Americans in the union had a strong collective conscience and unity; therefore, through their unity they were more capable of resisting repressions through collective action. On the other hand, whites were more individualistic and were easier for managers to coerce.
Nonetheless, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union briefly thrived. Rallies and meetings, heavily influenced by the Baptist church to which most black and white cropper and farming families belonged, were revivalist affairs, complete with union songs, skits, and addresses. Because of the church influence, many women became deeply involved in the union’s activities.
The legacy of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, though, as an integrated, vibrant union movement, stands as an example of Black and white labor militancy, and its emphasis on the power of revivalist songs and speeches in social struggle presaged the early civil rights movement.