The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas

The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas
Author: James D. Ross (Jr.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Agricultural laborers
ISBN: 9781621903536

"Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders, while attributing its demise to external factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, the repression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union's rank and file"--

Roll the Union On

Roll the Union On
Author: H. L. Mitchell
Publisher: Charles Kerr
Total Pages: 96
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780882861609

Founded near Tyronza, Arkansas, in 1934 by 11 white and 7 black workers, within five years the STFU was organizing all across the South and counting its members in the tens of thousands. Reviving old IWW traditions of workers' solidarity and direct action as its members added many an innovation discovered in the course of new struggles, the STFU brought a luster all its own to the labor insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s. The first fully integrated multiracial union in the modern South, the STFU prefigured not only later farm-workers' unionization by also the civil rights agitation of the 1960s and the growing rank and file labor revolt of our own time. Here is the dramatic first-hand account of the origins, struggles, strikes, achievements, humor, songs and poems of the rural south, told through one of the founders of the union.