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Since colonial times, farmers and other rural men and women have organized to protect their livelihoods and communities from the powerful interests of centralized governments, big banks, and large corporations. In protests movements spanning from Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts to the Farmers Holiday Association in Iowa, rural people agitated for control over local politics and for reforms to the political and economic system that would protect their interests. The Populist Party of the late nineteenth century is among the most important of these groups, as farmers in the north and south came together to create a new kind of political community.

This chapter examines the Universal Negro Improvement Association's (UNIA) legacy in the context of black activism. In particular, it considers the striking contrast between UNIA and NAACP success in the rural South, especially in the Georgia and Delta regions. It highlights the almost exclusively rural character of Garveyism in Georgia and its connection to the NAACP's popularity in urban areas of the state, as well as UNIA's presence in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. The chapter also discusses the strategies of the NAACP and another historically significant group, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, to win the support and leadership of blacks in the South, including rural farmers. Finally, it analyzes the role of Garveyism in promoting black nationalism as a deeply rooted ideology.

This chapter begins with Daniels's interview with Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) president J. R. Butler, then presents an overview of the union's founding and early years from 1934-1937. The union's struggles to achieve biracial unity and reconcile white leaders' Socialist vision with rank-and-file members' preference for independent landownership within the capitalist system are explored. The chapter briefly explains the disruptive effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and divisions within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the Department of Agricultural. Planters' violent reprisals against the STFU are also a major theme. The chapter recounts Daniels's visits to the Dyess Colony in Arkansas and the Delta Cooperative Farm at Hillhouse, Mississippi. Delta's relationship to the subsequent Providence Farm community in Holmes County, Mississippi, is noted. The STFU declined after its 1937 merger with the United Cannery, Agriculture, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPWA), which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Meanwhile, the creation of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) brought belated and ultimately inadequate federal attention to the problems of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

This chapter considers the south–north intellectual exchange of the 1930s. First, it examines how a cadre of left-leaning US reformers, led by the peripatetic academic Frank Tannenbaum, attempted in 1934 and 1935 to translate the blueprint of Mexican agrarian reform into political action for the US South. That campaign ultimately played an essential role in the founding of the Farm Security Administration, one of the most ambitious federal agencies of the New Deal. Second, the chapter looks at the myriad Mexican pilgrimages undertaken by a host of influential US rural reformers during the Cárdenas era. Perhaps no group outside Washington, D.C., was more renowned—or feared—for its agrarian radicalism than the multiracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union whose political legacy has been closely studied.

Chapter 6 opens with a scene from an Arkansas relief office, where a federal employee of the Resettlement Administration evaluated the program’s applicants based in part on personal religious priorities and the organization’s preference for mainline churchgoers. The chapter argues that a sizable cohort of southerners found the state to be the most effective outlet for their religious reform goals, while others outside the Protestant establishment—including members of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the pentecostal Church of God in Christ—formed new alliances both with and in opposition to New Deal officials. Fundamentalists and a growing cadre of anti–New Dealers within the Protestant establishment found common ground as they pursued an aggressive political stance aimed at preserving the Jim Crow order and restricting federal power. These fractures and reconfigurations within the southern religious order represent the culmination of a decade of religious transformations in Memphis and the Delta.

This chapter discusses the use of woodland for pasture and shelter. For many tenant farmers and cottars, especially in the Highlands and the Uplands, the main use of wooded areas was to provide pasture and shelter for stock. It is quite impossible to find a Scottish wood, either in the Highlands or the Lowlands, at least before the nineteenth century, from which domestic animals were excluded, except sometimes on a temporary basis. The woods evolved with grazing stock, and the distinction between a wood and a wood pasture is functionally meaningless.

This chapter places the emphasis on the build-up or ‘supply’ of agricultural knowledge in the eighteenth century. It explores how this knowledge supply was packaged and accredited for use. Several important vectors of transmission are identified, notably the role of agronomic travel and the burgeoning associational culture of the Enlightenment. In this context the significance of the career of the agricultural writer and inveterate traveller Arthur Young is referred to, as is the steadily expanding network of ‘economic’ societies which developed in every country of Europe after the mid-century point. Several categories of agents and instigators emerge as having played a particularly important role in the transmission of agricultural knowledge: improving landlords, land agents, well-to-do tenant farmers and the rural clergy. In this connection the debates among historians about the primary responsibility for agricultural change and growth (population growth, knowledge supply, expanding urban markets etc.) are considered.

This chapter chronicles the activism of both Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield as both men embarked on parallel courses to preach the working-class gospel and organize demonstrations and similar campaigns in order to help the poor. It also charts developments within the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU), its eventual alliance with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), and the internal disputes that later arose within the STFU–UCAPAWA ranks, which both Williams and Whitfield had to contend with, to varying degrees. Ratcheting up these internal tensions even further was the looming threat of communism. In addition, the chapter discusses the 1940 speech Whitfield addressed to the Third National Negro Congress in Washington, D.C.

This chapter traces the history of Pariah Problem by describing the inhabitants of Tamil and their preoccupation with landholding. Those inhabitants who lived primarily by agriculture in the villages of Tamil southern India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were divided in three broad strata: landowners, tenant farmers, and laborers. The mirasidars or landowner men controlled the village through the allotment of “shares.” The tenants were the most diverse subgroup of agriculturists; they were divided between uḷkuṭis (“in-dwellers”) and puṟakuṭis (“out-dwellers”). A laborer who had made some money might return home to become a puṟakuṭi tenant farmer. The laborers were landless agricultural servants comprised of the paṭiyāḷ and the paṇṇaiyāḷ. The former was paid a daily wage in kind by grain measure; while the latter was paid with cash.

This chapter examines Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a compilation of James Agee’s literary depictions and Walker Evans’ photographs of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama. It argues that Evans’ photographs of the rural South evolve from the realism and naturalism of New Deal documentary toward modern art, while Agee’s literary effort to realize the representative individuality of these tenant families reveals the anxious subjectivity of a persistent American modernism.

This chapter tells the story of the 1936 flogging of Willie Sue Blagden, a white, middle-class supporter of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) who became a target of antiunion violence when she and white clergyman Claude Williams went to Earle, Arkansas, to investigate the disappearance of black union member Frank Weems. This highly publicized attack on a white woman was seen as a violation of southern "chivalry" and contributed to both media sympathy and federal government support for the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, historical scholarship about the flogging has reflected a rather sexist disdain for Blagden, who went on to join the Communist Party, among the STFU's predominately white, male, Socialist leadership. Other victims of antiunion violence including Jim Reese and Eliza Nolden deserve to be remembered as well. The chapter concludes with Jonathan Daniels's conversation with STFU attorney C. T. Carpenter, whom he admired as a patrician who fought for social justice.

This chapter discusses Claude and Joyce Williams's move to Paris, Arkansas and the events that would eventually lead him to cross paths with Owen Whitfield. It details Williams's time as pastor of the local Presbyterian church and his later involvement with socialism (and the Socialist Party of Arkansas), as well as his efforts to combat fascism. Likewise, the chapter examines the more personal dimensions of his life as he goes through ordeal after ordeal in the spirit of social reform and the Christian faith. The chapter finally culminates in Williams's and Whitfield's first encounter, as the former gave a speech at Whitfield's Baptist church in Missouri in late 1936. The encounter, as the chapter shows, would later convince Whitfield to join in on Williams's cause.

Chapter 3 looks at the social movements of the 1930s and 1940s, their historical uniqueness, and how they gave support to and magnified the strength of labor movements, especially in the South—a distinguishing feature of this era. First and foremost were the struggles of the unemployed, led mostly by leftists, often Communists. The chapter also looks at the role of farmers, sharecroppers, and tenants, as well as the special role of civil rights organizations, north and south.