Activists of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union faced eviction, arrest, murder, even literal starvation, in their fight against Arkansas planters.

‘Terror Rages as Arkansas Bosses Battle with Starving Sharecroppers’ by James Evans from New Militant. Vol. 2 No. 9. February 29, 1936.

Death by Hunger Stalks On Pres. Roosevelt’s Poor Farms

EARLE, Ark. The share croppers of Crittenden county are going through hell. This whole area is a picture of starvation, evict on, and terror. Every militant cropper lives under a perpetual sentence of death. Any day, he may be shot from ambush by one of the planter deputies. Any night, some mob of landlords may drag h m from his hovel and string him up to the nearest tree.

Two meetings were raided recently by mobs composed of planters, landlord, deputies, and riding bosses. Howard Kester, Secretary of the Central Defense Committee of the Union, and H.I. Goldberger, lawyer retained by the organization, were dragged from the platform of a church, beaten and threatened with lynching. The five hundred cropper attending the meeting were attacked with clubs and axe handles. One of the deputies, an extremely drunken Southern gentleman, threatened to bring machine guns if the cropper: dared to hold another meeting.

The “Law” Breaks into a Meeting

At a second meeting held in St. Peter’s Church, Constable Everett Hood and a posse entered with shotguns manifesting the evident intent on of firing into the gathering. Hood was at first disarmed by Doorkeeper Jim Ball. The doorkeeper was arrested on charges of assault with intent to kill. After Ball had been jailed, the posse scoured the road, firing on the croppers who were going home from the meeting. Two unarmed men were shot in the back by these hired guerillas.

Simon Bas, leader of the Earle local, and three others were arrested the next day while returning from a conference with union officials in Memphis. The drumhead court at Marion refused them legal counsel and hurriedly sentenced them to one year each on charges of “rioting:” This case is now under appeal, and widespread mas support is needed to prevent the railroading of these fighters against Southern feudalism. District Attorney Denver Dudley, alert to prosecute croppers and the Union, naturally refuses to take any action against the official banditti of this section.

Even middle-class humanitarians are being threatened if they try to assist the croppers. A liberal minister attempted to find temporary shelters for the evicted croppers, The planter deacons held a special meeting and forbade him from “engaging in further subversive activities.” The minister complied; a revolutionist would have defied.

Meanwhile, the planters have decreed that all Union members must go.

People are living in tents on cold dirt floors, in abandoned railway stations, and in church buildings belonging to share-cropper congregations. Some families are huddling nine to a room in cabin of croppers who have not yet been evicted. Very often, these dispossessed rural laborer must live entirely on hoe-cake beans, and greens. A number of families have been settled on the Anderson Rehabilitation Farm, a project that was advertised to cure the ailments of the Earle County croppers. Contrary to the promises of the case workers, the remedy seem about to kill the victims. One six-year-old child starved to death on this Roosevelt poor farm, last year. The tenant remaining find themselves up against the same old proposition: their cotton taken to pay for “furnish”–with Mr. President substituted for Mr. Planter. Floyd Sharp, Arkansas State Administrator, lyingly maintains that all evicted families are being supplied with food and shelter.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union is very confused politically, still relying to a great extent on “law and order” although the croppers have been disfranchised by the sovereign state of Arkansas. Nevertheless, it is a growing challenge to the whole plantation system, perhaps the greatest expression of mass upheaval in the South since the pre-war slave rebellion. Highly significant is the formation of defense squads for exclusively Negro locals by white croppers.

The dying agricultural system of the South must be overthrown, and its beneficiaries expropriated by the tenants themselves. This is a task for the future. Today, the Union must be supported by protest actions and by donations if it is to continue its work. Funds are urgently needed and should be sent to the Union at Box 5215, Memphis, Tennessee.

The Militant was a weekly newspaper begun by supporters of the International Left Opposition recently expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and published in New York City. Led by James P Cannon, Max Schacthman, Martin Abern, and others, the new organization called itself the Communist League of America (Opposition) and saw itself as an outside faction of both the Communist Party and the Comintern. After 1933, the group dropped ‘Opposition’ and advocated a new party and International. When the CLA fused with AJ Muste’s American Workers Party in late 1934, the paper became the New Militant as the organ of the newly formed Workers Party of the United States.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1936/feb-29-1936.pdf