About Sharecropping Essay Research Paper SharecroppingTrudier HarrisA — страница 3

farmers in Tallapoosa County. Ralph and Tommy Gray gathered together a small group of black tenant farmers and sharecroppers and requested assistance from the Communist Party in Birmingham. Mack Coad, an illiterate black steelworker originally from Charleston, South Carolina, was dispatched from Birmingham on behalf of the Communist Party and became the first secretary of the Croppers and Farm Workers Union. Based mainly in Tallapoosa and Lee counties, Alabama, under Coad’s leadership the union built up an estimated membership of eight hundred within a two-month period. In July 1931, the union faced its first in a series of violent confrontations with local authorities. A shootout between union members and the local sheriff at Camp Hill, Alabama, left Ralph Gray dead and forced

many union and non-union tenant farmers into hiding. Mack Coad was forced to flee Alabama for the time being, but the union regrouped under the leadership of Young Communist League activist Eula Gray, Tommy Gray’s teenage daughter. Once the union was reconstructed, it adopted the name SCU. By the summer of 1932, the reconstituted SCU claimed six hundred members and a new secretary was appointed. Al Murphy, a black Birmingham Communist originally from McRae, Georgia, transformed the SCU into a secret, underground organization. SCU militants were armed for self-defense and met under the auspices of "Bible meetings" and "sewing clubs." Under Murphy’s leadership, the union spread into the "black belt" counties of Alabama and into a few areas on the

Georgia-Alabama border. In December 1932, another shootout occurred near Reeltown, Alabama (not far from Camp Hill), which resulted in the deaths of SCU members Clifford James, John McMullen, and Milo Bentley, and the wounding of several others. The confrontation erupted when SCU members tried to resist the seizure of James’s livestock by local authorities who were acting on behalf of James’s creditors. Following a wave of arrests and beatings, five SCU members were convicted and jailed for assault with a deadly weapon. Faced with large-scale evictions resulting from New Deal acreage reduction policies, sharecroppers flocked to the union. Its growth was by no means hindered by the gun battle. By June 1933, Murphy claimed nearly two thousand members, and by the fall of 1934

the official figures skyrocketed to eight thousand. Although most of those who joined the union were victims of mass evictions, the SCU led a series of strikes by cotton pickers in Tallapoosa, Montgomery, and Lee counties. Nevertheless by 1934 the SCU had failed to recruit a single white member. The Party attempted to form an all-white Tenants League, but the effort proved to be a dismal failure. Murphy, who left Alabama in the winter of 1934, was replaced by Clyde Johnson (alias Thomas Burke and Al Jackson), a white Communist originally from Minnesota who had had considerable experience as an organizer in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Rome, Georgia. Partially reflecting the new outlook of the Popular Front, Johnson made an effort to bring the SCU out of its underground existence and

transform it into a legitimate agricultural labor union. He founded and edited the SCU’s first newspaper, the Union Leader, and created an executive committee that elected Hosie Hart, a black Communist from Tallapoosa County, as president. Johnson attempted to establish a merger with the newly formed, Socialist-led Southern Tenant Farmers Union, but the leadership of the latter, particularly H. L. Mitchell and J. R. Butler, rejected the idea, claiming that the SCU was merely a Communist front. Throughout 1935, despite the union’s push for legal status in the black belt, SCU activists faced severe repression during a cotton choppers’ strike in the spring and a cotton pickers’ strike between August and September. In Lowndes and Dallas counties, in particular, dozens of

strikers were jailed and beaten, and at least six people were killed. In 1936 the SCU, claiming between ten thousand and twelve thousand members, spread into Louisiana and Mississippi. It opened its first public headquarters in New Orleans and, in an attempt to transform the SCU into a trade union, officially abandoned its underground structure. However, the SCU failed to deter the rapid process of proletarianization occurring in the cotton South–a manifestation of mass evictions and the mechanization of agriculture. Johnson continued to make overtures toward the Southern Tenant Farmers Union throughout 1936, but all efforts to combine the two unions failed. Thus, with support from Communist rural experts, particularly Donald Henderson, Johnson chose to liquidate the SCU as an