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This chapter focuses on the establishment of the Share Croppers' Union (SCU) on August 6, 1931. Al Murphy, appointed as SCU secretary, was a tremendous asset to the fledgling organization. Recognizing the need to expand into the black belt, he established headquarters in Montgomery where he worked closely with the city's leading black Communists. Murphy also developed strategies that emphasized self-preservation and cunning, in line with croppers' underground tradition of resistance. These include no meetings to be held in empty houses; SCU members were told not to walk in large crowds nor engage in armed action. The cotton pickers' strike in 1934 marked the SCU's first major victory since its creation.

This chapter focuses on James Wright, the son of sharecroppers and the grandchild of slaves. Seventeen and recently married, he struggled to find a job—like so many other Americans in 1936. While his wife Gladys worked as a cook in a white home, James alternately cut corn, worked at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, and washed cars at the local Chevrolet dealership in an attempt to make ends meet. Of the latter job he recalled, “You worked like a dog” and the owners, Henry and George Page, “called you nigger.” Over the next few years Wright made no less than three trips to Louisville to find work but returned to Russellville each time without success.

This essay reviews the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), by James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explores the daily lives of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Agee affects those who read him. For Jimmy Carter, the impact of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men seemed to be moral and religious. For Tad Mosel, Agee's presence was supernatural. Mosel's 1961 Pulitzer-winning play, All the Way Home, was adapted from Agee's posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family. Agee literally informs And Their Children After Them (1989), the book in which Dale Maharidge and the photographer Michael Williamson documented the lives of the survivors and descendants of the three families with whom Agee lived in Alabama. Agee was also a strong influence on the New Journalism of the 1960s.

This chapter examines the rise of the freedom movement in Memphis involving black students, sharecroppers, and sanitation workers. It begins with an overview of politics in Memphis following the Supreme Court's 1955 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, followed by a discussion of the student sit-in movement and its emphasis on “Freedom Now!,” aimed at the immediate desegregation of all public facilities. The chapter then focuses on two movements that drove working-class blacks further into politics: the African Americans' renewed protest against police brutality and the sanitation workers' protests against the city's treatment of its all-black corps of garbage collectors. It also considers the role of popular music and radio and the burgeoning “youth market” in the intensification of activism that challenged segregated cultural institutions.

Veronica L. Womack argues that white land control, an impoverished working class, and violent race relations resulted in a distinctive form of Black Power in Alabama. African Americans purchased land despite this, but Alabama still had the second lowest rate of black landownership among black farmers in the South in 1900. Most black farmers in the state operated farms on the cash-rent system. Sharecroppers likewise farmed, and they along with agricultural laborers suffered at the hands of merciless landlords. Sharecroppers and laborers briefly allied with the Communist Party during the 1930s and challenged the capitalist system that entrapped them in exploitive monoculture through participation in sharecropper unions. White supremacists responded with violence. These competing agendas between black landowners, cash- and share-rent tenants, and laborers created fertile ground for the emergence of militant Black Power and overtly separatist goals pursued by Black Muslims through the Nation of Islam in the aftermath of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This chapter explores the role of the African Americans in the establishment of the Populist movement in the late 1800s. It explains that during the late 1800s, multiple African American populist groups existed. These were composed of farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers. Most of these groups were independent from the white-led populist movement, and the most notable example of African American leadership in populist groups was the Colored Alliance.

World War I brought changes to America that affected sharecroppers in the delta country of Arkansas and strained racial relations between blacks and whites. Whites reacted violently to blacks’ decision to challenge the traditional pattern of economic exploitation by white landlords, culminating in the so-called “Elaine Riot” in early October 1919. The riot occurred in a section of Phillips County known as the “Black Belt” because of its high concentration of blacks, most of whom worked as sharecroppers on the many plantations in the region. The cotton lands around the small town of Elaine were owned by the Gerard B. Lambert Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Robert L. Hill, a black man from Winchester, Arkansas, saw that black tenant farmers needed protection from unscrupulous white landlords and decided to form The Organization of the Progressive Farmers’ and Household Union of America. This chapter examines the Elaine Riot and its causes, as well as the trial of blacks involved in the riot by an all-white jury.

Relating how Moses translated his McComb experiences into a solid method of organizing in 1962-1963 and,in the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), found an instrument to apply his approach across Mississippi, this chapteranalyzes how SNCC’s ideals worked in practice and explores the role that Moses’s singular characteristics, known as the Bob Moses Mystique, played in its effect. By incorporating how SNCC-workersin other states, particularly James Bevel and Charles Sherrod,duplicated his approach, it is demonstrated that Mississippi could develop this organizing approach most consistently, largely due to Moses, his hands-on organizing, and stress onexposure, ownership in learning, ‘credentializing’, and creating familial relationships. It illuminates how Moses’s personality, speech, contacts, and vision helped shape the Mississippi movement’s distinctive culture and why these spurred the universal projection of leadership onto Moses. Using Ruleville as a case study of Moses’s and SNCC’s day-to-day activism, it illuminates the interplay between fulltime activists and locals in producing social change. Central in this discussion is how they, through sophisticated planning and ‘trial and error’ tactics and by turning older tactics into organizing tools in themselves, expanded movement participation especially among sharecroppers like Fannie Lou Hamer and increased participants’ commitment, including their own.

This introductory chapter gathers a number of local histories and suggests that although many Americans worshipped in churches and worked on shop floors, most lived in the space between the pew and the picket line. This space includes Pentecostal miners who had faith in prosperity and sought miracles at the mine; automobile workers and sympathetic ministers evangelizing one another on the shop floor; and black sharecroppers and white Protestant liberals who saw the creation of a credit union as an investment in a more cooperative capitalism. The chapter covers a vast chronological and geographic scope and draws upon the diverse experiences of the American workforce, arguing that the space between the pew and the picket line is not only where most Americans have lived, but where the contours of both American Christianity and American capitalism have been shaped.

This chapter talks about James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study that focused on three “sharecropper” families in Alabama. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men translates into words the economy and simplicity of Walker Evan’s photographs, which featured local expressions of people found in unusual locations and portrayed the American scene from the 1920s to the early 1970s. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on Agee’s view of the unequal relation between writing and photography, claiming that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men would have been better if the book only compiled photographs with no writing at all.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his work with the Sharecroppers Union to mobilize poor farmers in the deep, Black Belt South during the early 1930s. In the spring of 1933, Haywood Patterson of the Scottsboro Boys was declared guilty in relation to the alleged rape of two white girls in Alabama in 1931. His conviction sparked a a wave of indignation among Black communities across the country. Mass protest rallies, demonstrations of all sorts, and parades culminated in the Free the Scottsboro Boys March on Washington on May 7–9, 1933.

One Evening in May 1967, in the parched border city of Mission, Texas, Ed Krueger had worked into the early evening on a painting and was late to the demonstration at the railroad crossing. He arrived there at 8:45 p.m. with his wife, Tina; his 18-year-old son, David; and Doug Adair, a young journalist writing for the magazine El Malcriado: The Voice of the Farm Worker. Just a few union members and bystanders were at the crossing when they arrived. Krueger, 36, a lanky and clean-cut minister, had been working with Local 2 of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFW) and had expected to see thirty or forty striking farmworkers and activists protesting the “scab melons” passing by on the next train. But they weren’t there, and Krueger was worried. They parked 75 feet south of the railroad crossing, on the west side of Conway Street. Krueger and his wife grabbed some hamburgers and sodas and leaned on their bumper to eat with their son. Adair went to talk to a reporter on the north side of the crossing. Joining Krueger was Magdaleno Dimas, an itinerant 29-year-old farmworker. A Mexico-born U.S. citizen, Dimas had a dragon tattoo on his right arm, a rose on his left, and an edgy zeal for the strike. They were waiting for a freight train carrying tens of thousands of recently harvested cantaloupes and honeydews loaded into thirty or so refrigerated cars. The melons had just been cut at La Casita ranch in Rio Grande City, thirty miles west of Mission. After a switch down-valley in Harlingen, the ranch’s melons would head north to San Antonio. La Casita, owned by a California company, operated nearly year round and employed 300 to 500 laborers on 2,700 acres of melons, peppers, carrots, cabbage, celery, and lettuce. The southern boundary of its well-ordered fruit and vegetable fields was the snaking Rio Grande River. All that separated La Casita from Mexico was a short swim across the slow-moving, greenish river that irrigated its fields.

The second event of the book—a paddy harvest—is presented in Chapter 4. Such an event encapsulates within it a number of dynamics, between landowners and workers, between members of the agricultural unions and others, and between the Comrade and the rest of the village. The examination of the minutiae of one particular harvest lays bare these dynamics and the importance of the legacy of a violent land reform movement in the 1980s that effected radical change. Such an analysis of the division of labor during a harvest allows for some new conclusions to be gained about cooperation and solidarity that emerge despite deep caste and class divisions. The account also shows how prayer meetings in the evenings for the holy month of Ramzan that happened to coincide with the harvest one year allowed for public and social expression of these newly forged solidarities.