Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union: Black and White Unite?

Teaching Activity PDF. By Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond. 12 pages.
Role play on farm labor organizing in the 1930s shows how racism had to be challenged to create effective worker alliances.

Download Teaching Activity (PDF).

This teaching activity examines efforts by black and white workers to overcome deep divisions and suspicions of racial antagonism. Students are faced with a “What would you do?” assignment that helps them grasp many of the difficulties in achieving some degree of racial unity.

At the same time, they realize the importance of confronting and overcoming racist attitudes. The interview with C.P. Ellis by Studs Terkel is a remarkable example of one individual’s awakening to these issues.

Goals and Objectives

1. Students will explore the difficulties of farm labor organizing in the 1930s.

2. Students will understand how racism divides potential allies.

3. Students will reflect on ways to overcome racism while trying to change oppressive conditions.

Setting for the Student Activity

It is the middle of the Great Depression and farmers, especially those who rent land or are “sharecroppers”—people who use others’ land in exchange for part of their crop—are hard hit. For one thing, cotton prices have gone steadily down. The response of the federal government has made matters worse. In 1933 the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed. The AAA was intended to boost cotton prices by paying farmers to take land out of production. According to the law, no tenant farmers or sharecroppers were supposed to be evicted from their farms. But that’s not how it has worked. Between 1933 and 1934, an estimated 900,000 people—black and white—have been thrown off the land by plantation owners taking advantage of the AAA.

Originally appeared in The Power in Our Hands: A Curriculum on the History of Work and Workers in the United States, published by Rethinking Schools. Power in Our Hands provides over a dozen interactive lessons on labor history. If you are looking for other lessons like “Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union” on key events in U.S. labor history, then Power in Our Hands would be an ideal resource. As Pete Seeger said: “Most school teachers are drowned in paper, but here is one book I want to recommend to them. It is a way of getting American teenagers not just interested, but excited and passionate about their history—modern American labor history.”

Keywords: racism, lesson, sharecroppers, organizing, race, union, plantation owners, farmer, Ku Klux Klan, Arkansas, dialogue, Great Depression, cotton, Agricultural Adjustment Act, “scrip”, Elaine Massacre, Alabama Sharecroppers’ Union, laborers, Naomi Williams, H.L. Mitchell, Tennessee, Norman Thomas, Socialist Party, Clay East, Ward Rogers, Alvin Nunnally, J.R. Butler, opposition, George Stith, segregated, Louisiana, Raceland, American Legion Hall, Dr. Calvin Hoover, Howard Odum, Mr. Henry Wallace, Reverend E.B. McKinney, Reverend N.W. Webb, Paul Appleby, Henrietta McGee, New York, Washington, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Studs Terkel, North Carolina, hate, Klansmen, city council, low-income, Ann Atwater, Martin Luther King Jr.