CRY FROM THE COTTON: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.16 (634 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1557285225 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 218 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-08-15 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Good look at agricultural labor during the Depression Travis Sing Grubbs traces the plight of Southern tenant cotton farmers, both black and white, and the effort to provide tenant farmers with job security and financial stability through unionization. The book begins with the economic and agricultural fallout of the Civil War and on to the movement's initial organization, the New Deal, and efforts to join the AFL-CIO. In 1934 two young Socialists organized the Southern Tenants Farmers Union (STFU) near the town of Tyronza, Arkansas, in order to gain fair wages for tenant farmers who were kept in pe
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union was founded in eastern Arkansas in 1934 to protest the New Deal's enrichment of Southern cotton barons at the expense of suffering sharecroppers, both black and white. The volume stands as a classic on labor issues and class struggle and still echoes with the haunting plea of the dispossessed for equity.. It discloses that, although the union operated under noticeable socialist party sponsorship in its infancy, it drew much more upon the native Southern evangelical and populist traditions, much as the civil rights movement would do twenty-five years later. Grubbs convincingly demonstrates that while the STFU failed to gain immediate social justice for its members, it resulted in the formation of the Farm Security Administration, which even today continues to aid the rural poor, and it played a large part in forcing the formation of the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, whose spotlight on management terrorism helped the CIO toward success. Their courageous struggle, in the face of determined and often violent resistance from thei
Grantham, Vanderbilt University author of The South in Modern America. "It was in Arkansas—in the rich cotton land of the Mississippi Delta-that the desperation and hope of the early New Deal years led thousands of tenant farmers to do the unimaginable, to rebel and to organize in their own defense." —Dewey W