page_title: Southern Tenant Farmers Union
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Southern Tenant Farmers Union / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: E.B. McKinney, STFU Vice President crop of pic by Louise Boyle Photo ID: 5859pb2f15ap800g Collection: Louise Boyle. Southern Tenant Farmers Union Photographs, 1937 and 1982 Repository: The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives in the ILR School at Cornell University is the Catherwood Library unit that collects, preserves, and makes accessible special collections documenting the history of the workplace and labor relations. www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/kheel Notes: Copyright: The copyright status of this image is unknown. It may also be subject to third party rights of privacy or publicity. Images are being made available for purposes of private study, scholarship, and research. The Kheel Center would like to learn more about this image and hear from any copyright owners who are not properly identified so that we may make the necessary corrections. Tags: Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives,Cornell University Library,African Americans, Labor Leaders, Union Officers
context_page_description: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union was founded as a civil farmer's union to organize tenant farmers in the Southern United States.
  Originally set up in July 1934 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. 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.
context_section_description: Agriculture in the south never fully recovered after 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 Sharecropping, 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.
  One of the first actions taken by the union was the filing of a lawsuit against Hiram Norcross.  This was to ensure that the rights of sharecroppers under the AAA were protected and that they received a share from the government subsidies as the act envisioned.
  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 STFU 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
caption: E.B. McKinnery
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