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Story and Photos from the Whitfield Foundation Newsletter
April 2008, Volume 1, Reprinted here with their permission.
One of the most significant yet neglected events of recent American labor history was called ‘The Sharecropper Strike of 1939’. Although it was not really a strike,they had no one to strike against. The Sharecroppers had been evicted from their homes, homes to which they had no rights, as owners or as renters. They decided that their government and fellow citizens should know how one group of Americans lived, so they went out along the highway to demonstrate it.
One cold morning in January 1939, residents of Southeast Missouri awoke to a startling sight. Overnight, more than one thousand sharecroppers had appeared alongside two state highways, with them were their families and their few meager belongings.  These sharecroppers had left the Missouri Bootheel Cotton plantations where they lived and worked to stage this dramatic demonstration. They were protesting a new farm policy, the Agricultural Adjustment Act that had come from the New Deal Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. A loophole in this policy allowed plantation owners to keep government money they owed the sharecroppers - if they fired their current sharecroppers and hired new ones to take their place. The organizer of the protest was an African American Minister, Reverend Owen H. Whitfield (also known as ‘Cotton Patch Moses‘).
Owen Whitfield
Owen Whitfield was a sharecropper and Vice President of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which was dedicated to creating better conditions for farm workers. Reverend Whitfield always said “Take your eye’s out of the sky, cause somebody is stealing your bread”. He convinced the other sharecroppers, that this demonstration would draw public attention to their plight. Along the frigid highways, the protesters were hungry and cold. The American Red Cross refused to help, calling the protest “a manmade disaster”. Day after day, the sharecroppers remained by the roadside, huddling in tents, some with only old iron cook stoves to warm them. The demonstration began to attract national attention and to embarrass the state government. Reporters and photographers from major newspapers flocked to the Bootheel to follow the crisis. A professor of history at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri went to visit the demonstrators and came away horrified. When he described what he had seen to his classes, students gave up their spring prom and donated the money to help the sharecroppers. Activist Fannie Cook organized a committee of citizens to send relief to the protesters. Cook’s committee along with the Lincoln University students donated money so that the sharecroppers, led by Owen Whitfield, could buy a parcel of land: 93 acres near Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Several hundred both black and white sharecroppers moved to the site, which came to be known as “Cropperville”.
The sharecroppers began tilling the land and building houses. Although there was much hunger and sickness, even some deaths at the beginning, Cropperville slowly began to take shape with a school, a church, and community gardens. Within a year, changes brought about by the protest were beginning to be visible. The governor held a conference at which Owen Whitfield, the planters, and  officials talked about ways to help the sharecroppers. The federal government also got involved in the Bootheel, agreeing to provide new forms of assistance. Through the Farm Security Administration they created the Delmo Homes communities: ten villages in the Bootheel for sharecroppers who needed a place to live. But time went on, and the world began to change. Cropperville residents moved away to fight in World War II or to find better jobs.
Finally, Owen Whitfield also moved to take a new church position; ten years after it had begun, Cropperville was all but deserted. Even though Cropperville did not endure, the roadside demonstration was still a success. The story of the sharecroppers is an inspiring example of courage in the face of poverty and injustice. Not only did this protest lead to change on the state and national level, but the share-croppers also managed to create a better life for themselves and their children. In the words of the song which they sang during the protest, many sharecroppers did finally find “Freedom, Oh Freedom, Oh Freedom After While”.
Click on the picture to see the complete gallery of Cropperville photograhs. |
