African American Women in the Depression-Era Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union

FOUNDING MOTHERS AND MOVEMENT MAMAS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE DEPRESSION-ERA SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS’ UNION by Matthew Placido A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2013 Copyright by Matthew Placido 2013 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was undertaken thanks to the support of many individuals, especially my wife, Julienne, who has stuck with me through thick and through thin, despite the fact that it has been nearly impossible for either of us to explain what exactly I have been doing with my life whenever the strangers we meet at parties ask what it is that I do (as if we go to parties.) When struck with questions about black women in the labor movement during the Great Depression, I would have never thought to look rural, much less at the STFU, if not for the helpful guidance of my committee chair, Dr. Derrick White. I certainly wouldn’t have cracked the more than twenty reels of STFU administrative archives if not for the encouraging words of my supervisor Dr. Talitha LeFlouria, who has always lent an ear to my crazy ideas and who has been more than willing to help me see the forest for the trees whenever I have been unsure about the pieces of the puzzle I uncover. A city boy like me would know nothing about cotton picking or the plantation system in Arkansas without reading lists recommended to me by Dr. Evan Bennett. Additionally, there are my colleagues Katherine Dahlstrand, Christopher Rodgers, and Dana Brown, who generously volunteered their time and input on the various drafts of this manuscript. Many thanks to Doris “Dee Dee” Brown, whose contributions to my understanding of the Warr family have been absolutely invaluable. Then, of course, there are my parents, Stephen Placido and Pamela Mara, who have provided the material resources and economic security for me to focus on this project. Finally, there is the staff of Florida Atlantic University, and all of the hard working people who keep its History iv Department functional, that I owe my gratitude to. I don’t know why everything I’ve done so far has been tolerated, but it has been, and for that I am grateful. Of particular note are the angels working up in the Interlibrary Loan Department, who have stepped in on multiple occasions in order to ensure that I had the resources I needed. This project is dedicated to the ordinary heroes who, throughout history, have made great personal sacrifices to fight against injustice and slavery. If I even possibly see further, it is only because I stand upon the shoulders of those unlikely giants. v ABSTRACT Author: Matthew Placido Title: Founding Mothers and Movement Mamas: African American Women in the Depression-era Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Derrick White Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2013 This paper explores the lives of poor, black sharecropping women, arguing that the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union provided an avenue for them to embrace civil rights activism, perform semiprofessional work, and construct a sisterhood of black female solidarity – thus making the union an organization through which lower-class African American women contributed to the Long Civil Rights movement. During the Great Depression, black and white farmwomen from the Delta region worked together to fight the system of racial subjugation and exploitation. Black women represented one of the largest and most important demographic groups within the STFU, frequently serving as secretaries, local presidents, and organizers for the union. The administrative records and public literature generated from within the STFU movement show that these women made great strides in pioneering the model of gender-neutral, racially cooperative activism that would be later embraced by SNCC during the mid-twentieth century civil rights movements movement in which many of them as “movement mammas.” vi FOUNDING MOTHERS AND MOVEMENT MAMAS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE DEPRESSION-ERA SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS’ UNION I. Introduction…….............................................................................................................1 II. African American Farm Women and the Meaning of Labor…………………………11 III. Sharecroppers Organize: Understanding the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union….....39 IV. Sisters Organize: Black Women as Activists, Secretaries, and the Deserving Poor...70 V. Conclusion..................................................................................................................104 Bibliography....................................................................................................................129 vii I. INTRODUCTION This study examines the Southern Tenant Farmers‟ Union from the perspective of its most economically vulnerable members, African American women. Such a study is needed, not just because it shines light into a dark and understudied corner of the history of the STFU, but also because there is a shortage of studies examining black women in the interwar labor movement in general. Certainly, in recent years, there has been recognition that black women were a vital part of the radical movements that emerged during the Great Depression as scholars have explored the importance of these movements. Most of these studies, however, have depicted African American women‟s decision to fight for civil rights as one motivated by economic or political factors, and many questions about how labor unions “fit” into the lives of Depression-era black women remain unanswered.1 The study of black women within the labor movement is itself a growing subfield and the product of more recent historiography. African American labor history was born out of the racial uplift movement and thus remained outside the mainstream of academic scholarship. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered the field when he examined the work experiences of African Americans during Reconstruction. Du Bois‟ work was largely ignored by his white contemporaries in favor of labor histories by John R. Commons and other contributors to what Thomas Krueger has dubbed “the old labor history.” These studies tended to focus on the more conservative trade unions and their white male constituencies. The old labor history depicted African Americans as a 1 problem in labor history – shiftless outsiders to the union movement who served as potential “scab labor” and strikebreakers.2 Nonetheless, throughout the early 20th century and especially during the Great Migration, these African American labor researchers whom Francile Rusan Wilson has dubbed the “segregated scholars” continued their research in the social sciences in hopes of remedying the problems of black labor. It was during the Great Depression that these scholars began to examine African American participation in the labor movement after World War I. In their 1930 work The Black Worker: The Negro and The Labor Movement, Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris argued that after the Great Migration, the emergence of the “New Negro” movement enabled African Americans in the North to become inherently aware of the economic challenges presented to their race, but that the formal labor movement held little promise. Therefore, African Americans looked to other solutions to their social problems, in the form of radical political economic movements such as socialism, racial self-sufficiency, and “Negro Zionism,” or Black Nationalism. Spero and Harris note that there was participation of blacks in the I.W.W. and the successes of A. Phillip Randolph and the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters. The former, a radical internationalist union, and the latter, an all-black union, were both examples of African Americans participating on the fringes of the labor movement.3 In the mid-20th century, the “new labor historians” challenged this idea that black workers played a minor role in the labor movement during the interwar period. Herbert Northrup, in his 1943 article, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America,” argued that the UMW successfully organized strikes during the interwar period in many states because union leadership did not use the imagery of blacks as scab labor. Instead, 2 “they encouraged the Negro to join the union and guaranteed them full privileges of membership.”4 This school of thought carried the day during the 1960s and 1970s as historians focused on strikes and movements where African Americans played a decisive role. For example, in his 1974 work Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Phillip S. Foner examines Depression-era activity in the south by radical black labor activists who operated associations that were styled as civil-rights organizations to hide the fact that they were essentially labor unions. The perspective of the “new labor historians” has challenged historians to consider the importance of organizations outside of conventional workingman‟s associations within the 20th century labor movement.5 It was during the 1970s when serious academic discussions of women‟s roles in the labor movement came to the forefront. Though during the “old labor history” era there was scholarship on women in unions, scholars emphasized their domesticity and their ancillary position to male-dominated-and-lead unions, if they were mentioned at all.6 Alice Kessler-Harris‟s 1975 article “Where are the Organized Women Workers?” instead focused on women workers who did not

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