Owen Whitfield and the gospel of the working class in new deal America, 1936-1946.

WHEN IN APRIL 1932 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT spoke of "the forgotten man," he was not referring to an African American sharecropper named Owen Whitfield. (1) However, by decade's end, Roosevelt would sit down with Whitfield in the White House to discuss the plight of southern tillers of the soil. Whitfield is best known as the leader of a roadside demonstration in Missouri in 1939 in which he mobilized fifteen hundred desperate black and white sharecroppers to dramatically protest their worsening rural poverty. Perhaps more than any other single depression-era event, this southeast Missouri protest, where sharecroppers proudly stood amid their meager belongings along two federal highways, made America's dispossessed visible to the nation. Yet, while the demonstration helped make Whitfield a national figure, it marked only a single episode in a life of much broader work among the downtrodden. (2)

As an organizer and activist between 1936 and 1946, Whitfield worked to transform the aspirations and struggles of black southerners, first in the cotton fields of southeast Missouri and later in southern cities, into concerted collective action in pursuit of social and economic justice. A black sharecropper and preacher, Whitfield cultivated and gave voice to an independent, grassroots radicalism that emerged amid the collapse of relatively stable and prosperous black farming communities in the early 1930s. He did this by refashioning the core beliefs at the heart of these communities--beliefs in the power of religion, the dignity of hard work, and the life-giving bonds of family and civic responsibility--into a vibrant indigenous protest movement tooled for the political realities of the New Deal. While Whitfield worked closely with national labor and civil rights organizations throughout his career, he allied with them only as a means to amplify the voice of the grassroots movement he represented. (3)

Whitfield rooted his independent pragmatism in a radical gospel that sought Christ's salvation in earthly works rather than in heavenly rewards. His development as a working-class preacher stemmed from two sources: the advent of a radicalized, grassroots "hard times" religion among rural blacks in the early 1930s and the parallel emergence of white southern adherents to the social gospel through progressive groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU). Uniting the two, Whitfield led rural blacks into a spiritual and political working-class revival, eschewing denominational church hierarchies to channel the spiritual power of grassroots believers into progressive labor unions, through which the rural poor demanded inclusion in the New Deal. (4) As the plantation system collapsed in the late 1930s, Whitfield continued organizing among the thousands of blacks seeking new opportunities in southern factories during World War II, using a style of religious protest fashioned in the rural countryside to shepherd their transition from agricultural laborers to industrial workers.

Amid the flash and howl of the political and ideological battles of the 1930s and the war years, historians have assumed, religious belief and fellowship acted as a conservative force on southern African Americans, obstructing their struggles for racial and economic justice. Orlando Patterson, for example, concludes that until "the 1950s, most of the Afro-American churches, especially those led by the large number of semiliterate preachers, preached a gospel of spiritual withdrawal and sociopolitical passivity." Aldon D. Morris also concentrates on the black church in the 1950s as a foundation for civil rights organization, adding that it only became politically significant in urban areas. (5) Whitfield's story reveals, however, that rural and working-class African American resistance in the 1930s and 1940s often stemmed from radical religious convictions. Moreover, Whitfield's career provides an essential view of the rich network of interchange between urban and rural black working-class movements, locating the roots of the civil rights unionism of the 1940s in the rich soil of African American lives and labors in the rural South. (6)

Scholars of the New Deal era have focused scant attention on the intellectual engagement of people like Whitfield because they are often silent in the historical record. Instead, particular organizations, political parties, or places frame analyses of the 1930s and 1940s. (7) Whitfield offers an important exception because he wrote copious letters to allies like H. L. Mitchell, Claude Williams, and Fannie Cook; these letters, when pieced together, illuminate Whitfield's understanding of the world. When Whitfield stands at the center of the historical narrative, he emerges as a skillful and even manipulative intellectual and activist who used larger Popular Front networks only as they suited his two core goals: aiding the soil tillers and grounding the gospel of Christ in the everyday experiences of ordinary people.

Born to a sharecropping family on a plantation in the heart of the Mississippi Delta in 1894, Owen Whitfield's early life was both ordinary and exceptional for a black man living in the rural Jim Crow South. The Whitfields, like many sharecropping families, moved frequently to find a land-tenure status that offered more security and independence than sharecropping. Following a year of relatively lucrative work for wages in Memphis in 1904, the Whitfields purchased a four-acre farm in western Tennessee. They labored at a frenzied pace to remain on their land, but the death of Owen's mother in 1907 sent their fragile family economy reeling. Heartache, medical debts, and the loss of supplementary wages led to the loss of their land. (8)

This early experience of economic independence and its loss made a formidable impression on Whitfield. After his mother's death, he took work in a handle factory, using his earnings to enroll at Okolona College, a religious school for blacks in Mississippi. He studied theology for two years, during which time he met and married Zella Glass, a thirteen-year-old cotton picker. The newly married couple, with children soon to follow, searched in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi for a profitable farming situation. In late 1922 they secured a stable arrangement in Mississippi County, Missouri. (9) In the burgeoning new cotton lands of southeast Missouri, also known as the Bootheel, the Whitfields joined a nascent migrant community of relatively prosperous black farming families. Whitfield discovered that rural black life in the 1920s Bootheel revolved around Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a black separatist organization headquartered in Harlem. Bootheel Garveyites created communities grounded in the pursuit of black self-determination and independence, with leadership structures based on tenure hierarchies and kinship networks, all rooted in the fertile alluvial soils. In 1923 the Whitfields made that soil produce fifty-two bales of cotton on their forty-acre plot, a great yield anywhere. (10)

In addition to farming, Whitfield felt a call to preach. Relatively well educated, he found ample work in newly formed local black churches, itinerating between several congregations by 1930. Preaching not only supplemented his income but also brought Whitfield social prestige, propelling him into community leadership. As an itinerant preacher, he developed a measure of authority in several communities, providing a spiritual and informational conduit between them. (11) Whitfield's preaching also placed him in close touch with the aspirations and hardships of the mass of rural blacks in his congregations.

For Bootheel farmers the Great Depression began in 1926. Heavy rains that year, followed by the epochal Mississippi River flood of 1927, heavy rains again in 1928, national economic distress in 1929, a withering drought in 1930, and the utter collapse of cotton prices in 1931 decimated the earning power, stability, and living conditions of thousands of landless farmers, including the Whitfields. The election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the initial New Deal programs in 1933 brought little relief. In fact, the first New Deal attempt to correct the cotton market, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), did considerable damage to cotton workers, reducing acreages by 25 percent in 1933 and 40 percent in 1934-1935. Compensation schemes for the reductions did not adequately protect the rights of tenants, making it possible for landlords to defraud them of their rightful share, often by demoting them to laborers and thus ending even their formal eligibility for federal assistance. (12) Economic crisis and iniquitous government policy pushed the Bootheel's rural black communities into a vortex of worsening poverty and social dislocation.

As the foundations of their communities rapidly eroded in the mid-1930s, the Whitfields and their neighbors struggled to make sense of the upheaval in their lives. By 1933 many rural black congregants began to feel alienated from their Baptist and Methodist churches, whose "respectable" leaders seemed unable to relate to the larger social crisis. (13) Many rural blacks turned to independent, "new-sect" pentecostal and holiness churches that offered empowering worship for congregations made up of poor sharecroppers and wageworkers and that were often led by untrained working-class preachers. (14) In the summer of 1934 this growing religious revival fed into a renewed Garveyite movement mobilized through a militant pro-Japanese offshoot of the UNIA, the Original Independent Benevolent Afro-Pacific Movement of the World (OIBAPMW). Bristling with religious fervor and racial pride, the OIBAPMW engulfed Mississippi County, sparking grassroots, insurgent support among many mainstream congregations, gathering six hundred members in Charleston alone. It proved so popular that Whitfield later recalled that his Baptist church threatened to expel him unless he preached the OIBAPMW line. Pulled along, Whitfield joined. Within weeks, however, the OIBAPMW collapsed after organizers were jailed for fomenting rebellion. Feeling used and betrayed, Whitfield and other members promptly quit. (15) The experience left him acutely aware that his neighbors sought a religious life more relevant to their everyday struggles. By 1935 he faced a growing spiritual crisis.

Simmering rural discontent reignited in 1936 when John Handcox, a black organizer for the STFU, an Arkansas-based union of landless farmers protesting AAA laws, arrived in Mississippi County. That summer, Handcox and Claude Williams, a white theologian and national STFU leader, held a union picnic in Charleston, the county seat. Among those attending was Whitfield, skeptical that the union wanted to rile rural blacks like the OIBAPMW had done. But Williams shocked Whitfield by preaching a "radical gospel" that situated the STFU at the heart of the struggle against racial and economic injustice, connecting the spiritual upheaval within Whitfield's community to an emerging religious vision among a minority of southern white working-class preachers. Whitfield came away convinced by the urgency of the union cause, and he promptly joined. (16)

The STFU struck Whitfield as an epiphany. He came to see union work as a divine calling, a way to reconcile his duty as a community leader with the spiritual and economic needs of the rural poor--his neighbors and congregations. By late 1936 Whitfield had become a part-time local organizer for the union. His new preaching, combining Williams's "radical gospel" with the growing spiritual revival among rural blacks, appealed powerfully to his congregations, bringing hundreds of new members into the STFU. (17) Whitfield's churches became the center of local union activities, offering safe venues for union meetings away from the gaze of hostile planters, and STFU proceedings became steeped in a religious idiom and imagery based on the grassroots spiritual creations of rural blacks. Grassroots radicalization through the STFU brought clarity to the social tumult of the mid-1930s, reuniting wrecked communities by channeling the volatile spirits of religious revival into new community groups.

Whitfield would later describe the process of his "conversion" in allegorical form, consolidating the spiritual searching of his neighbors, radicals like Williams and himself, into his own personal narrative. In his retelling, Whitfield sat alone with his team in the cotton patch after a long day in the field. Suddenly, the evening quiet was interrupted by the pitiful cry of his daughter who told him that there was no food left in the house for supper. Hungry and exhausted, Whitfield fell to his knees and prayed to God. "You said the righteous and them that preached the Gospel would never go hungry," he bellowed. "But I done worked, behaved my self, kept Your precepts--and those that haven't is gettin' along much better." At some point during his Job-like lamentation an answer came to Whitfield from within, "like the commonsense part of me." "But you ain't been preachin' the Gospel--just makin' a noise," the voice said. "I bless you with enough product to fill many barns. Somebody's gettin' it. If you ain't," the voice continued, "that's your fault, not Mine." (18)

Suddenly awakened, Whitfield decided to stop "whoopin' and hollerin' at God" and begin preaching the gospel of the STFU--economic and spiritual renewal through collective action. A preacher who will "tell you about Heaven and can't tell you how to get a loaf of bread here" was now a "liar" to Whitfield. "A sermon," he declared, "sends you home happy. The Gospel sends you home mad." Whitfield chose the gospel, reviving a radical strain of African American Christianity that had waned with the rise of Jim Crow. Like other "new-sect" churches and anti-segregationist radicals such as Williams, Whitfield now spoke of the everyday needs of congregants over otherworldly concerns and of worshipping Jesus as he lived rather than focusing on the crucifixion of Christ. At the core of his new vision, religion (faith in God) and labor (works on earth) became interwoven parts of Christianity. (19)

Whitfield's revelation was soon tested. On the morning of January 25, 1937, with river levels rising, the Army Corps of Engineers dynamited a hole in the riverside levee, flooding the Bird's Point-New Madrid Spillway, a region encompassing eastern Mississippi County, designed after 1927 to be flooded in order to relieve pressure on the levees at Cairo, Illinois. The explosion sent a torrent of icy, muddy water over the homes and fields of several thousand landless black farmers, including the Whitfields, who fled into hastily arranged refugee camps. (20)

Their lives shattered by federal dynamite, the spillway refugees, guided by Whitfield and Handcox, decided to make their own New Deal for landless farmers. Just as Whitfield began to see the culpability of the federal government in rural poverty during the flood crisis, another story emerged in the camps. There the American National Red Cross fed, clothed, housed, and vaccinated the refugees in close coordination with the Resettlement Administration (RA), which issued them loans for feed and seed. This massive relief effort, in sharp contrast to the local abuses of relief during the 1927 flood and 1930-1931 drought, revealed to the refugees for the first time the potential of federal power to intervene on the side of rural workers and improve their lives. (21)

Building on this novel understanding of the New Deal, Whitfield and Handcox issued a list of union demands to area landlords and the federal government. They demanded that the New Deal ensure and protect their rights to fair rental agreements, their access to affordable credit and markets, their protection by public health safeguards, and their right to raise garden crops, hogs, cows, and poultry for subsistence use and sale. To accomplish this, they insisted that the RA, an agency formed to help landless farmers secure land, address their everyday lives as it had their plight during the flood. (22) Although their demands came to naught, Whitfield and Handcox had laid a strong foundation for renewed organizing efforts that spring.

After the flood crisis, Whitfield built upon that foundation, placing the gospel at the center of the growing union groups. In April 1937 the STFU revoked Handcox's position for financial reasons, making Whitfield the semi-official organizer for Missouri. Upset at being replaced, Handcox warned the STFU office that Whitfield would not have much time to devote to organizing "for he's farming and pastoring 3 or 4 churches." Handcox did not realize, however, that Whitfield's religious commitments and farm labor were part and parcel of his approach to organizing as a preacher and community member. "Been so busy working in the fields all day and tuning around at night," Whitfield reported in June, "trying to get these locals to functioning again." (23)

Whitfield's leadership during the flood crisis catapulted him higher into union leadership. Chosen to represent Missouri at the July founding convention of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) in Denver, Whitfield participated in the STFU's decision to become part of UCAPAWA, a CIO affiliate. (24) The strength of the CIO impressed Whitfield and emboldened his organizing for the STFU. "Whitfield come here," another union member reported, and said "his credentials comes now from the C.I.O. or the aggracultur cannery union." In this way, Whitfield crisscrossed the Bootheel, testifying to the new power of the STFU through the CIO, rejuvenating old locals, and forming new ones. By the close of his campaign there were twenty-six STFU locals in four counties in southeast Missouri. (25)

With the help of the STFU, Whitfield traveled to Washington, D.C., in December 1937 to lobby the Roosevelt administration to prevent the planned eviction of ten thousand black and white landless farmers in southeast Missouri. The pending evictions stemmed from the new programs put in place after the AAA was declared unconstitutional. These measures gave more rights to tenants and croppers than had the earlier contracts allowed under the AAA, but, in doing so, the new regulations created further incentive for planters to replace tenants and croppers with wageworkers. Whitfield "made it plain to the Administration," he informed a local newspaper, that he wanted "adequate relief measures for this mass of people, white and black." Whitfield now believed that in years past the rural poor had kept too quiet, so quiet "that many people at large who would help us know nothing of our plight. The sharecropper has no representative in Washington, or any place else.... We are compelled to cry out." He explained that he was "a Gospel minister" but found it nearly impossible "to preach a gospel of peace and good will to people facing eviction, and facing winter without food!" (26)

Whitfield used his trip to Washington to intensify pressure on local and state officials to stop the evictions. In a letter to a local newspaper, he warned landlords and the government that unless they provided landless farmers the "lease on life we once had," they would witness the spread of "radicalism and communism and all other 'isms.'" Whitfield denounced communism, reaffirmed his belief in democracy, and cast himself as an important guard against such a radical turn among his followers. "Give us the right to till the soil that we fought and shed blood for," Whitfield demanded, "and thereby keep the spirit of Democracy foremost in the minds of the workers." If not, he warned, they would give their votes to "men that will hand us a square deal in return." He took this message directly to local elites. Invited to speak about his trip by "Planters and Merchants," he "told them just enough to scare the hell out of them." In addition, the governor invited him to Jefferson City to discuss potential relief, offering Whitfield a place on a committee overseeing the welfare of blacks, a move that he dismissed as a crude ploy to secure "the union votes in Missouri so to hell with them." Knowing that his real power lay with his followers, he held a mass meeting of area locals to make clear that they wanted "some relief started for the people all over southeast MO." Days before the evictions were to take place, Whitfield lodged a last-minute appeal with President Roosevelt, urging him "to do all that is in your power to get protection for us." No federal support materialized, however, and planters evicted several thousand people in January 1938. (27)

Amid the evictions, Whitfield, driven by his new political mission, launched a renewed organizing campaign. He later recalled that it was in the first few weeks of 1938 that he grasped how politics worked in the U.S. Whitfield told audiences that the rural poor had to "organize for power" before they could do anything to change their pitiable plight, itself a result of powerlessness. He explained to potential members that they could not just join a "Santa Claus" union for seventy-five cents and then get "land, mules and hogs. We must organize for power before we can obtain these," he argued. Whitfield increasingly believed that union members had to exert their united force politically and claim "the balance of power." An institutional ally stronger than the STFU was needed, for it had been unable to prevent the 1938 evictions and eschewed partisan politics. (28)

Whitfield increasingly saw the CIO as an effective platform on which to build concerted political strength, especially because its promotion of racial unity as a source of strength could attract landless whites, whose support he thought essential for changing federal policy. Still, Whitfield never relinquished the goal of black independence and assumed that whites did not want to change social relations. Yet, for either to survive, he reasoned that both would have to pool their collective resources. To illustrate his point, Whitfield frequently carried a cartoon to union meetings with one frame showing two mules, one black and one white, pulling in opposite directions toward two different piles of hay. In the second frame the two mules were hitched together pulling toward one pile, then the other. Despite working toward separate goals, he argued, neither blacks nor whites would reach their goals unless they combined strength. (29)

Organizing now around more expansive notions of working-class collective action, Whitfield transformed the local STFU-CIO groups into a broad-based mass movement in the Bootheel. During 1938 he boosted the number of dues-paying members to over forty-six hundred in at least twenty-nine locals. This grassroots surge was met with new attention from New Deal agencies. Representatives from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the successor to the RA, called on him to get "the lowdown on ... the conditions of the homeless people in S. E. Mo.," and Virgil Bankson, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) investigator, surveyed Whitfield's community. Bankson's visit testified loudly to the movement's growing political impact because the NLRB did not protect agricultural workers. (30)

Whitfield's political husbandry seemed to bear New Deal fruit in June 1938, when the FSA opened La Forge Homes, a cooperative farm in New Madrid County to house a hundred sharecropping families with the purpose of "rehabilitating" them as stable farmers. La Forge provided its sixty white and forty black clients (including the Whitfield family) access to land, decent housing, production loans, and training, as well as cooperative marketing associations and tools for community self-government. (31) Thad Snow, Whitfield's planter friend and benefactor, had secured his placement on the FSA project. With the blessings of La Forge's director, Hans Baasch, Whitfield used the colony as an organizing base. He formed a Good Citizen's League to encourage his neighbors to vote, and he was elected to the previously all-white advisory board but refused the post for fear of creating racial tension. (32)

La Forge made tangible Whitfield's solution to the plight of the rural poor. Providing secure land tenure, a nice home, a garden, access to education, and a rich community life, it supplied everything Whitfield and Handcox had demanded after the 1937 flood, all protected by the power of the federal government. La Forge recreated the rural black world that thrived in Mississippi County in the early 1920s, an image of independent family production units secure on their own land and bound by stable rural communities and cooperative associations. But it was largely a mirage, as thousands of families, in contrast to the one hundred at La Forge, remained locked in poverty and soon faced an unprecedented wave of evictions scheduled for January 1939. "If'n the Garden of Eden an I heard a lil baby cryin on the other side o that door," Whitfield later explained, "I couldn't be happy less'n I got that baby in too." The example of La Forge brought together his dreams as a farmer and his mission as a union leader and transfixed him for the remainder of his career. (33)

Meanwhile, the basis for Whitfield's organizing success in 1938 was under threat at the STFU's convention that year. A faction of STFU officers, led by the president, J. R. Butler, wanted to sever links with UCAPAWA because they feared its communist ties and resented its attempts to transform the more amorphous STFU into a rigid trade union. Rising to defend CIO affiliation, Whitfield argued that "it gives [the STFU] more power" by providing "us not 40,000 but 40,000,000 voting power." He backed up his reasoning with a sermon, telling the gathered delegates of a man thrown to sea from a shipwreck who kept grasping at bits of wood that quickly sank until he "felt something solid and held onto it for it was a rock and he was saved." "That story is just like our union," he continued, "we have been tossed about by many storms and often our support has disappeared from us ... but we reached out and found a rock to cling to and I say to you brothers ... that rock is the CIO." Put simply, Whitfield argued that the STFU would not survive a split with the CIO. "I'm done in Missouri if we are not connected with the C.I.O. I want to see the STFU first," he admitted, "but I'd have a hell of a time organizing." (34) Despite his defense, STFU leaders edged closer to disaffiliation, and to prove their resolve they expelled suspected communists, among them Claude Williams, from the union. (35)

Rather than enter this internecine struggle further, Whitfield withdrew to focus his efforts in late 1938 on preventing upcoming evictions. Sensing that union electoral action could not work fast enough, he began in July a "speaking and organizing campaign getting the people in readiness for a drive on the federal government." Using La Forge as a model, his goal was to force the "FSA to continue its homesteading projects," combining STFU calls for cooperative farming with CIO methods of direct action without losing connections to Garveyite traditions of proud black self-sufficiency. In August, after a conference with Baasch, Whitfield contacted John Clark, president of the Urban League of St. Louis, and proposed a series of speeches there and in other cities that would "put the plight of these homeless people before the nation in an effort to get the assistance [and] to get these people back to the soil." Despite his union ties, Whitfield professed to Clark "no desire to go out as an official or organizer of any labor movement, but as the voice of a people that is homeless and is drifting from place to place." As the STFU-UCAPAWA crisis worsened, Whitfield backed away from his official union duties, intent instead on helping his people mobilize. (36)

Convinced that only direct political action would stave off disaster, Whitfield held meetings with his followers throughout the remainder of 1938 to discuss possible strategies. At one of these meetings, a farmer facing eviction reportedly suggested jokingly that since he had nowhere else to go, he would have to camp out on the side of the road. Whitfield latched on to the idea. A roadside protest of homeless, destitute sharecropping families, he reasoned, would publicize their poverty and their struggle, forcing the federal government to intervenes

Whitfield designed the demonstration to be a grassroots, independent action of local people, inside the union and out. The plan was simple. Evicted families, mobilized and led by local union activists, would form roadside camps in the early hours of January 10 all along U.S. Highways 60 and 61 in the Bootheel. Consisting of neighbors, kin, and friends, the residents of these camps would rely on ties to their communities to support them for the duration of the protest. Once on the roadsides, local union leaders would be responsible for keeping the camps together while Whitfield called upon northern audiences and political officials for action. (38) To reinforce community supply lines and ensure national exposure, Whitfield secured assurances of support from civic and labor organizations in St. Louis, particularly the Urban League.

Desperate lest union infighting interfere with the protest, Whitfield approached the STFU and the CIO much like he had the Urban League, as sources of political and material support rather than direct leadership. His wariness of higher union involvement was piqued in October 1938 when several Bootheel STFU locals mistakenly joined a union strike over cotton-picking wages meant to take place in Arkansas, heightening local official pressure on union activity. Whitfield denounced the strike in local papers, arguing that instead of striking for wages, rural collective action should aim to secure a place on the land. Having corresponded with the STFU national office only twice since early September, he informed Mitchell in December that evicted families would "pile their household goods on sides of the highway" to protest upcoming evictions, demanding STFU help once it happened and nothing more. Meanwhile, Whitfield attended UCAPAWA's convention in San Francisco as an STFU delegate; there he informed the CIO leadership about the planned demonstration. Before leaving he was elected a vice president of UCAPAWA. In these efforts to secure support, Whitfield positioned himself to act as a conduit between the unions and the demonstration. His confident connection with the STFU in late 1938 reflected his position as a national leader in the union. As only a minor activist in UCAPAWA, however, Whitfield first had to embed himself as a CIO leader, which he did in San Francisco, before he could be assured of its support while maintaining his autonomy. Returning on December 20 to oversee the performance of La Forge's black choir at the project's dedication, Whitfield had inconspicuously set the stage for an upcoming dramatic act of resistance. While the New Deal officials in attendance remained oblivious, the choir's song selection, including "Don't Drive me From Your Door," "God Don't Like It and I Don't Either," and the finale, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," foreshadowed the protest on the horizon. (39)

By the end of December 1938 Whitfield had marshaled his forces for the demonstration but still worried about potential union interference. After San Francisco, he avoided any contact with either the STFU or the CIO. Claiming that he was too busy searching for some errant mules, Whitfield skipped the STFU convention while pledging his support for the union. Local union leaders John Moore and R. H. Bradford advised their followers not to attend as well. It is unlikely they did so without Whitfield's consent. With the demonstration a fortnight away, Whitfield and his top assistants finalized their plans in the Bootheel, far from the leaders of the STFU and UCAPAWA. (40)

As expected, planters welcomed several thousand sharecroppers into the New Year by issuing eviction notices. And, as planned, evicted farmers and union members began preparing for their move to the roadsides, due to take place under cover of darkness on January 9, the last day of grace in most cropping arrangements. At dawn, their plight would be visible for the entire world to see. To ensure the widest exposure, Whitfield had arranged a final organizational meeting of about 350 core protestors in Sikeston on the night of January 7. He also invited Thad Snow and Sam Armstrong, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. With Armstrong in attendance, Whitfield knew he had one chance to reveal to the public the moral imperatives behind the protest before planters denounced it. (41) He took the pulpit that night and spoke not just to the gathered crowd but also to the nation.

The meeting rang with the spirit of revival. Amid resounding prayers and hymns, Whitfield compared the plight of the rural poor to that of Christ, saying, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the heaven have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." His audience, both black and white, responded enthusiastically. "How many of you got a notice to move?" Whitfield asked. Hands shot up. "How many have got a place to go?" he countered, and the room went silent. "That's why we're here," Whitfield thundered, to "bear our burdens together." So, he asked, "Where we goin' to go?" The response deafened. "Sixty-one Highway!" they shouted. Whitfield encouraged them not to be afraid, for they had history on their side. Just as the Lord had freed Moses and the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, so He would free them now. "We also must make an exodus," he exclaimed. "You've got no place to go," he concluded, "and the only thing left for us is to move quietly like good citizens to the highway." It was time to make people "see what we're up against." (42)

On the morning of January 10, fifteen hundred black and white landless farmers huddled in thirteen well-ordered roadside camps. Whitfield was not among them. He had already left for St. Louis, both to help coordinate relief for the demonstrators and to ensure his own physical safety. Still worried that the STFU would disrupt his plan, Whitfield wired Mitchell urging him to "keep out." Once in St. Louis, Whitfield met with Urban League officials and oversaw the establishment of the Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Sharecroppers (CRS), which secured clothing, surplus commodities, and tents for the demonstrators and organized fund-raising events featuring Whitfield. In the following weeks Whitfield appealed for support to crowds in St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Washington, where he met personally with President Roosevelt. "Our wish is to get back to the soil," Whitfield told his audiences. "We don't want anyone to give us anything, but we want some kind of help to put us back to the soil," he said, urging the FSA to expand its activities in the Bootheel. While Whitfield's contacts with the CRS and UCAPAWA enabled his speaking tour, Mitchell and the STFU, although resentful of recent slights, set up meetings for him with members of Congress; Will Alexander, director of the FSA; and Roosevelt. (43)

As Whitfield pleaded to a shocked nation, however, the demonstrators on the roadside suffered. On January 13 the state health commissioner of Missouri declared the roadside camps a "menace to public health" and ordered them removed. The highway patrol broke up the camps, scattering the demonstrators across the Bootheel in isolated churches, saloons, and a swampy site in the spillway. When informed that the removal was based on health concerns, Whitfield exploded, demanding to know if "they think those shacks my people have been living in are any healthier?" Having left the area, however, his only recourse was to intensify his pressure on politicians. While the demonstrators suffered, so did Whitfield. "By doing this," he explained, "I have lost my home and is without a job." Worse still, he was away from Zella and the children, who had remained at La Forge, where they received frequent death threats. In February they finally joined him in St. Louis. (44)

Whitfield's religious conviction kept him on course. He was proud, he wrote, that he "dared to do what no Negro Preacher has ever dared to do, and that is to wake up the slaves." He had "[struck] at the roots of a system that held our people in slavery for over 50 years, and has sent our mothers and fathers to a paupers grave without enjoying any of the fruits of their toil." This cause was "worth everything I gave up," he concluded, "to put an end to this darn system. I know that God is pleased, and I feel that the American people will not let me starve." (45)

Amid this turmoil, Whitfield lost vital connections with the demonstrators, whose own internal organization collapsed, allowing the two warring unions to exploit their needs for sectarian ends. With Whitfield absent, the demonstrators pleaded for help from the STFU and UCAPAWA, investing their best hopes in these two powerful allies. Police blockades and intimidation, however, complicated union efforts to supply aid. Working from Blytheville, Arkansas, the STFU could only reach the southern Bootheel, while UCAPAWA aid from St. Louis was limited to the northern camps. To complicate matters, local landlords forced the FSA to stop providing the emergency food grants it had started issuing to the demonstrators. As a result, the money and supplies Whitfield raised fed into a broken relief structure, serving only to fuel efforts by both the STFU and UCAPAWA to control the demonstration by using relief to sway the protestors to their side. As the demonstrators divided according to which union met their expectations, Whitfield struggled to remain independent. He found it increasingly hard to prove "that our people will stick together if they have a leader that they can trust, a leader that won't sell them out." (46)

At the depth of this crisis in early February, Whitfield wrote two letters to the Missouri locals, his first mass communication in over a month. "You have fought the biggest fight you ever fought in your life," Whitfield exclaimed, "and you have won." He knew that the authorities had tried "TO STARVE YOU TO DEATH" by breaking up the camps. Moreover, he knew how the police had tried to "make you lose faith in me and the union." He reiterated his commitment to the exiles and their protest, reassuring them that he had secured support for the STFU's effort "to get land and homes for all of the union people," and he advised them "to get busy and build our frontline trenches and continue our fight for freedom from wage slavery." Since the STFU was working to get the FSA grant checks reinstated, he advised them to stand with the STFU rather than UCAPAWA, which people "don't like" because of its communist ties (a deliberate echo of the STFU leadership). Neither he nor the STFU, he promised, would fail them. (47)

But the STFU did fail, and so, it seemed, had Whitfield. The STFU failed to restart the FSA grants, and on February 18 the union closed its relief center in Blytheville. At this critical hour, Donald Henderson, president of UCAPAWA, launched measures to take control of the STFU membership by expelling its national leaders. To do so, he cited examples of STFU malfeasance in getting demonstrators relief. Henderson's tactics hit directly at Whitfield's credibility with his own people. For the first time, Whitfield's followers lashed out at him, telling him "to go to hell" after his broken promises about the STFU. Bombarded with complaints from protestors who had not received STFU aid, including his closest followers in Mississippi County, Whitfield switched direction, blaming the STFU for betraying him and them. (48) He called a state convention of all Missouri locals for March 12 in St. Louis, where they would decide whether or not they wanted "to go on with the great labor movement in America" or stick with the STFU. The CIO offered immense power, he reminded them, evoking an old refrain, but the schemers in the STFU were determined to obstruct its work in the Bootheel just as they had, he accused wildly, blocked CIO relief from reaching the roadsides. "Are you with me," he demanded to know, "or are you against me.?" (49)

Twenty-one locals stood by Whitfield, voting in St. Louis to remain with UCAPAWA. After the vote, Whitfield reorganized these locals into the Missouri Agricultural Workers Council (MAWC), affiliated directly with UCAPAWA and under the elected leadership of William Fischer, a white sharecropper, as president and Whitfield as secretary. Although seriously weakened, the STFU retained at least five of its locals in the area. (50) Union loyalty in this split was decided not by ideology or race but by a complex web of factors, including grassroots activists' personal allegiance to Whitfield, their experience during the demonstration, and their perceptions of political power. The CIO dominated in the northern areas, such as Mississippi County, because its relief had been most successful there and Mississippi County was Whitfield's main power base. (51) The STFU retained locals exclusively in the southern Bootheel, where the union's relief work had been most tangible and connections to Whitfield thinnest. Both groups contained large numbers of white and black members; Fischer rose to lead MAWC, and Willie Scott, a black woman from New Madrid, led support for the STFU. With his house divided, Whitfield barreled ahead, urging his followers to "march toward freedom and security." (52)

Whitfield spent the summer of 1939 working to secure a lasting victory from the roadside demonstration. First, he helped lobby the FSA and state officials in late 1939 and early 1940 to build labor group homes to house displaced agricultural workers. Built in eight different communities and collectively known as the Delmo Security Homes, the finished project housed five hundred families, both black and white. (53) Meanwhile, under Whitfield's direction, the Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Sharecroppers purchased a ninety-four-acre tract of wooded hillside near Harviell in Butler County, Missouri. Eighty black and fifteen white families, among the last of the demonstrators without homes, moved that summer to what they called Cropperville, ending for them a decade-long struggle against landlessness and dependency. Ever loyal to Whitfield, the residents of Cropperville established a MAWC local that remained strong through the mid-1940s, long after the other Missouri locals crumbled. Meanwhile, Whitfield's local successes increasingly placed him in the national spotlight. (54)

In February 1939 President Roosevelt and Owen Whitfield sat down in the White House to discuss a New Deal for the rural poor. As a national labor representative and leader of the famous roadside demonstration, Whitfield had to be taken seriously, even by the president. In the ensuing conversation Roosevelt attempted to unveil the source of power behind Whitfield's sudden prominence. Suspecting political subversion, Roosevelt asked Whitfield if he was a communist. Feigning ignorance, Whitfield asked the president to explain the term communist. Roosevelt replied by saying that a communist was someone who thought they could take someone else's property for free. Based on this definition, Whitfield deemed whites as the real communists, having stolen so much land from the Indians. (55) Whitfield's response evinced not only his independent radicalism but also an outspokenness that did not stop at the White House door.

Indeed, in the months following, Whitfield sharpened his arguments before northern audiences--black and white--to convince them to aid the plight of the sharecroppers. (56) These speaking engagements raised much-needed money for Missouri's sharecroppers as well as made Whitfield a nationally recognized leader. The Schomburg Library in Harlem and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History named him one of ten award winners for "distinguished achievement in improved race relations during 1939." (57) Invited to be the guest of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in New York and again by the Roosevelts to the White House in February 1940, he entered chambers of power that few sharecroppers ever imagined. Much to the chagrin of white supremacists in his home state, these events "made [Whitfield] so stuck-up," according to the Sikeston Standard's editor, "that nothing short of him being returned to Southeast Missouri, placed on [the] plantation where he formerly worked with the riding boss back of him with a black snake whip ... would satisfy a great number of citizens." (58)

Undaunted, Whitfield garnered more headlines at the National Negro Congress (NNC) meeting in Washington in April 1940. At this third national meeting of the NNC, a black-led network of grassroots activists who sought to connect civil rights goals with organized labor, Whitfield revealed his thoughts on religion, race relations, and folklore. Men of religion, he explained, preached "too much INSPIRATION and too little INFORMATION," which led them to "preach Jesus Christ" but "refuse to accept the policies of Christ." Whitfield claimed that the church had gone so far astray from its principles that "if Jesus Christ would come to earth in 1940 ... the church group would be the first to have him investigated by the Dies Committee." By referencing the red-baiting congressional committee led by Texas congressman Martin Dies, Whitfield drew a parallel between government harassment of radicals in 1940 and Roman efforts to suppress Christ's radical message. Second, Whitfield declared that the "Negro has had more organizations than any other race on earth, but the bosses had no objections to these organizations, because of the fact that they consist only of Negro people." Interracial alliances and the "spirit of cooperation" remained vital to cutting the "traditional rope called 'White Supremacy.'" Last, Whitfield believed that to cut the rope, "sky pilot" preachers, "two-bit silver tongued schoolhouse political orators," and the folklore of "witchcraft and hoodooism" needed to be replaced by leaders "who will not sell [a Negro] down the river" and would thus allow every African American to "stand up and demand his rights," "get access to the ballot box," and overturn white supremacy. (59)

Whitfield's speech astounded the audience of prominent African Americans and labor activists. Reporting on the NNC for New Masses, Ralph Ellison deemed Whitfield the "hero of the convention." Ellison explained: "[Whitfield] speaks with the skill of the Negro folk-preacher, in terms and images the people understand. The people from the farm country shout 'Amen!' and 'It's the truth!' Whitfield is of the earth and his speech is of the earth, and I said 'Amen!' with the farmers.... His is the pride of one who knows what it means to fight and win. He made the nation listen to the voices of his people." To the NNC audience, Whitfield personified the connection between militant rural sharecroppers and urban industrial unionists, a link that black activists and intellectuals strove to make during the Popular Front era. Too often, Whitfield told the gathering, educated blacks "high-hat or ignore the man who is not finished in learning." Yet, he explained, "a man may be unlearned but there is a possibility of [him] getting up and doing unheard of things that may rock the nation." Whitfield connected these intellectual and political leaders to his own activism. "With your learning and my experience," he concluded, "we can end Jim Crowism." (60) In 1940, the potential for a working-class movement that could unite black and white, rural and urban seemed greater than ever, with Whitfield in its center.

Having severed his ties with the STFU, Whitfield threw himself into work with UCAPAWA, hoping to reach more black workers. UCAPAWA connected Whitfield to new urban labor environments, and while he embraced this new role, he also remained concerned about the people from the roadside demonstration. In September 1939, for example, he urged all UCAPAWA members to send supplies to help the farmers at Cropperville until their first harvest. (61) Whitfield hoped UCAPAWA would act as a benefactor for the people of Cropperville and also pressure the federal government to provide direct aid to the settlement.

Whitfield's strategy of working simultaneously as a national and local organizer succeeded at first. In June 1940 MAWC met in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, near Cropperville. According to Whitfield and UCAPAWA, twenty-five hundred union men, pastors, and sharecroppers (some of whom fit all three categories) planned an organization campaign to triple UCAPAWA members in Missouri in order to increase pressure for federal assistance. Whitfield reported that by the fall of 1941 sharecroppers in Missouri had pushed planters into doubling picking wages, and the "bosses had to tuck in their tail to union forces." When the state removed sharecroppers from relief rolls and told them to "go and hoe cotton" the following year, Whitfield convinced state authorities to put twenty-four families back on relief and lobbied the FSA to provide seed loans to all labor home residents. Whitfield's band of followers in Cropperville and the other labor home sites seemed to have found the means to sustain themselves by living off the land. To him, they offered a model for the rest of the sharecroppers in his state. (62)

Whitfield's involvement with UCAPAWA and national prominence in the early 1940s also brought newfound political scrutiny. Local police blocked the highway at Sikeston to turn back delegates from attending the Poplar Bluff union meeting in June 1940, and at the national level Martin Dies put Whitfield on the "red list" that Dies circulated to local and state authorities. When in August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact, the American Communist Party abruptly halted its previous Popular Front policy to fight fascism. The Dies Committee in turn stepped up its anticommunist activity, and black activists like A. Philip Randolph severed ties with communists. To Whitfield, however, it only mattered if communists changed their tactics on the ground. Recently, he claimed, a plainclothes officer had shown up at a Missouri meeting to warn about communists. "If [the reds] come around," the officer told them, "let me know, because there is a bunch of damn reds around here." Silence followed until a sharecropper nicknamed Big Boy exhorted: "We don't know anything about the Russians and reds you are talking about, but we do know the southern whites. We want to make this plain. We learned one thing--we learned to love the things you white folks hate." Whitfield believed that if communists helped win "our wage scale," croppers would have no problem associating with them. (63)

When Whitfield relocated to UCAPAWA's Memphis office in early 1942 to join the campaigns to organize oil-compress, gin, and tobacco workers throughout the South, he entered a hotbed of UCAPAWA activity. Since most of these workers were black and recent migrants from rural areas, UCAPAWA's Donald Henderson sought new methods to organize them. He found one such method through Claude Williams. Expelled from the STFU in 1938, Williams had conceived of an independent institution that would connect the revolutionary aspects of Christianity to the practical struggles of workers. With an "artist friend" in 1940, Williams drew up charts to convey this message to illiterate and semi-literate audiences. These charts would become the key teaching tool for his new organization, the People's Institute of Applied Religion (PIAR). In August 1940 Henderson invited Williams to hold PIAR seminars in Memphis. (64)

Despite earlier disagreements about the STFU, Williams and Whitfield maintained their long-standing relationship through the PIAR. (65) Once the men met in 1936, Williams deeply influenced Whitfield's own thinking about preaching and unionism, and their careers followed similar paths into the industrial union movement. As early as February 1939 Whitfield spoke of the "applied religion," indicating that the two may have co-developed the PIAR through conversations and practice. To finance the new organization, Williams appealed to the Religion and Labor Foundation, run by Harry F. Ward, Willard Uphaus, and Alva Taylor, Williams's mentor from Vanderbilt University. As Williams developed the institutional apparatus of the PIAR, Whitfield began to integrate PIAR terminology into his own sermons. Although distasteful to many progressive activists during the 1940s, religion and radical politics went hand in glove for Whitfield. The application of religion to politics spoke to Whitfield's past activism, and the institutionalization of this perspective provided him with an ideal base from which to operate. (66)

When, in August 1940, Donald Henderson asked Williams to develop programs for Memphis workers, Williams and Whitfield, along with Harry Koger and William DeBerry, became the PIAR's architects in Memphis. Williams came to Memphis first and conducted a two-week leadership training school with Koger in August 1940. The organization of workers, with PIAR help, succeeded. UCAPAWA won three NLRB elections by the end of the fall season, and by the end of 1940 the union had organized over a thousand workers in sixteen different cotton compress, warehouse, and seed oil plants. Resistance to the PIAR's radical message from Memphis's anti-union political machine and established churches, however, caused problems for Williams, who reluctantly left the city in late 1941 after being threatened with vigilante violence. (67)

But he left the PIAR in good hands. Whitfield moved to Memphis in 1942 as a southern organizer for UCAPAWA, and working alongside Harry Koger, he helped enroll four thousand UCAPAWA members by spring 1943. He was reelected later that year as vice president of the union by more than eight thousand votes and again stationed in Memphis. With more than ten thousand total CIO members in Memphis by March 1942, the union momentum seemed irreversible. The "CIO," Whitfield wrote that November, "is taking this town by storm." As part of his work, Whitfield quickly became a mouthpiece for the PIAR. In November 1942 he introduced a gathering of workers to the organization. "I spoke last night to a group of bout 100 men and women in our UCAPAWA class," he wrote to Williams, "and I mentioned your and my work." He then asked how they would like it if he brought his "charts." "You should have heard the people yell," Whitfield continued, "BRING EM! THAT WHAT WE NEED." He immediately wrote to Zella to send him the PIAR charts, and at the next meeting, Whitfield wrote excitedly, "I will have my charts on the wall, and go to town." Whitfield believed that he would induce revolutionary changes by training preachers like himself through the PIAR. "We have lots of preachers of the common people in our union here, who work in plants and preach on sunday," he strategized, and "I will train these and have them go out and train others and set up institutes." In December 1942 Whitfield reported remarkable progress. With his charts "on the wall," he taught groups of workers from four different plants. (68)

Whitfield also made organizing trips to other southern cities for UCAPAWA, most importantly to Winston-Salem, home to fourteen thousand tobacco workers, two-thirds of them black. In July 1942 Whitfield joined fellow UCAPAWA and PIAR leaders DeBerry and Koger to deliver a number of speeches to black congregations. The following spring, Whitfield helped organize a Citizens' Committee that registered black voters and even ran a black candidate for the board of aldermen. The candidate, the Reverend Edward Gholson, lost by a landslide, but his candidacy represented a key civil rights challenge to the lily-white board. Most significantly, only a few weeks before the tobacco workers employed by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company walked out on strike, Whitfield spoke to 350 employees at the Mt. Calvary Holiness Church. His speech applied Roosevelt's Four Freedoms--freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear--to the union struggle. Civil rights and economic rights, Whitfield told workers, were attainable through unions. By the end of 1943, UCAPAWA had won NLRB elections at Reynolds and the three independent tobacco-leaf plants in Winston-Salem. During the next year, these locals won seniority rights, a grievance procedure, wage raises, and vacation time. Other successful campaigns followed suit at Reynolds and at the American Tobacco Company in Charleston, South Carolina. While local blacks in these places were responsible for winning these gains, Whitfield provided inspiration and legitimation for their struggles. (69)

Despite these victories, the tensions between national union work, his family, and his extended family--the dispossessed sharecroppers of Missouri--troubled Whitfield. As early as November 1942 he ruminated over the tension generated by these overlapping allegiances. Fannie Cook, who had assiduously supported the residents of Cropperville since the roadside demonstration, told Whitfield to stay the course. "When you bother about how the Cropperville families will live, you are being the pastor to your people," she wrote, "but when you go out and organize unions and train other men to head them, you are being a leader for your people." Putting the choice in biblical terms, Cook concluded that "You must think the situation through and decide whether you want to be a Moses or a minister." (70) Through his work with UCAPAWA, Whitfield chose the role of Moses, but he did not see why he had to relinquish his position as a minister. Although he stayed with the union, he felt compelled to go home.

Whitfield grew disconcerted about his inability to sustain his commitment to the people of Cropperville. During the war, UCAPAWA concentrated only on those industries that were covered by NLRB (or collective bargaining) supervision, which did not include agricultural laborers. Whitfield saw the efficacy of organizing industrial food, oil, and tobacco processing workers, but increasingly he felt like he had abandoned the most disadvantaged workers back home. In 1944 he requested a transfer to act as an organizer for UCAPAWA in Missouri, but the union turned him down. (71)

This rejection punctuated Whitfield's increasing dissatisfaction with the UCAPAWA leadership. He began to suspect that certain UCAPAWA leaders assigned him difficult tasks in order to sabotage his efforts and tarnish his reputation. Whitfield felt this pressure when given the task of organizing the South's largest compress plant, which UCAPAWA had tried and failed to unionize in 1940. UCAPAWA "sends me down here," he wrote "and puts 'THE DEAD CAT' in my hands and if I dont make good then I will be considered no good as an organizer." (72) Whitfield believed that his own independent tendencies attracted this apparent antipathy within the union; some thought his work outside UCAPAWA bounds would "destroy all of the possibilities of organizing negroes in the south. They knew I possess such power." But, he continued, "I would not do such a dirty thing as that." (73) With little trade union experience, Whitfield resented UCAPAWA's attempts to control him.

Whitfield's frustration with UCAPAWA also highlights a significant contradiction between Whitfield's desire to agitate as well as organize workers and the desire of communist members of UCAPAWA to quell strike activity (and concomitant civil rights demands) for the sake of the Allied war effort. (74) Realizing the federal government's desire to prevent wartime wildcat strikes, Whitfield also risked accusations of disloyalty to win better conditions for workers. "I stired up so much hell among the workers until they were going to shut down every oil and compress in memphis friday night," he bragged during a 1942 campaign in Memphis. According to Whitfield's account, representatives of the National War Labor Board rushed to Memphis to begin negotiations after "the radio began broadcasting [the work stoppage] and the war labor board heard it and it stird up washington." (75) Again, his first priority was to gain tangible benefits for workers; if that meant a strike during wartime, then so be it.

Above all else, Whitfield had little confidence in UCAPAWA's approach to organizing southern blacks, many of whom had recently been sharecroppers. He complained to Cook that organizers never asked him for advice. Furthermore, "THEY FORGETS THAT I AM ONE OF THESE PEOPLE, AND KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH AND BOUT THEM." UCAPAWA wanted Whitfield to establish union beachheads that would be developed by others. Despite frequent success, Whitfield felt he was never able to see an organizing drive to its culmination. For example, in March 1943 he wrote, "Just as soon as I gets [started] at WINSTON-SALEM and gets the ball [rolling] so they can handle things, they pulled me out and sends me here to help brother KOGER with 7,000 planter's peanut workers. And I am getting them organized at the rate of 40 per day, and will have an NLRB election on the 12th of APRIL, and I feel sure of winning it." Whitfield considered these hollow victories because he never had sustained contact with one group of people. In fighting for sharecroppers, Whitfield established trust through community ties, not by organizing elsewhere after a key vote or settlement, as UCAPAWA did. "All I do down here is organize them (or get them to join the union)," he complained, "then the white man (from new york or some place) takes over the handling of them." (76) Whitfield wanted to remain a Moses and so began to look for other institutions from which to lead African Americans out of economic captivity.

Whitfield used the exigencies of wartime to embolden his rural organizing strategy as well. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Whitfield retooled his rhetoric, especially when addressing government officials. Where he might have used the communist threat to secure aid in the late 1930s, he now deprecated the Japanese people as a way to demand that the U.S. government allow farmers to do their part for the war effort. Concerned about "those ALMOND EYED MURDERERS [who] has leaped upon our people in our outlying islands and murdered them by the thousands," Whitfield warned that blacks in the Bootheel might once again turn to subversive, pro-Japanese groups like the OIBAPMW as they had in 1934. "[T]hese thousands of negroes," he wrote, "are convinced that the JAP is the negro's best friend." On the other hand, if the government distributed needed supplies and aid, Whitfield said, these farmers would become "an army behind the army, an army of food producers, instead of food consumers and rel[ie]f clients." As it was, Whitfield and the residents of Cropperville could only protest "the waste of man power." By threatening the possibility of black disloyalty, Whitfield hoped to cajole the FSA into action. Although neglected by New Deal labor legislation like the Wagner Act, these "producers," Whitfield believed, would force the government to recognize their importance during the war emergency or risk their defection. (77)

These protests and letters to wartime government officials did little until February 1944, when the FSA agreed to provide loans to run the Food for Victory program. As part of the bargain, Whitfield moved back to Cropperville "for keep this time" to "direct the garden and feed program," as well as to "personally produce 15 acres of cotton on the outside as a cash crop to pay off our loan." The people on the land now had to produce or leave the land, an ultimatum Whitfield preferred because factionalism had plagued Cropperville since its founding. With the need for maximum production for the war effort, he saw an opportunity to secure better living conditions. "Uncle Sam has took all [the planters'] Labor," Whitfield concluded, "so we are making [them] pay like hell." (78)

Since UCAPAWA rejected his request to work as a paid organizer in Missouri, Whitfield turned to the PIAR for institutional support. This suited him because he traveled less frequently and Williams valued his work in Missouri. For both men, the source of holiness stemmed from the practical and everyday struggles of life. As Williams would later claim, "The working-class preacher has been spurned by political progressives because he is religious," and "[l]abor unions have refused to organize his people because they could not pay dues." The PIAR cared less about NLRB status or dues-paying membership; Williams instead castigated "[r]ocking-chair reds" who "dismiss religion" in favor of partisan politics. To Whitfield, the PIAR's characterization of sectarians on the left epitomized his frustration with both Mitchell and Henderson, atheists who each used religion tactically. These leaders failed, Whitfield believed, to see how religion constituted the core of activism. "No one can be a good trade unionist," Whitfield thundered, "until he is really Educated and anchored in the FACT that the Brotherhood of Man is the only salvation for the Common People." Now, in 1944, Whitfield believed that the PIAR was the only "organization in America today that really gets to the roots of the cause of the suffering of the People ... where all else has failed including trade unions." (79)

Earlier that year, Whitfield had reevaluated his priorities when Zella became ill. Since all the older children had entered the armed forces or defense industries, his wife had little help managing the family economy in Cropperville. "If ! do any kind of work like organizing or teaching," he ascertained, "it must be close enough to home." In addition, Whitfield concluded that organizing processing workers elsewhere should come second to aiding agricultural producers. "After four years of constant travel contacting people of many races, and peoples of all statuses and walks of life, from highest executive to the vagabond of the roads," Whitfield wrote, "I have taken many days out from work and isolated myself to give thorough study to the present condition of the soil tillers." Stepping back and looking at the larger picture allowed Whitfield to evaluate his experiences and chart a new course of action. He would now rebind himself to his community and to God by focusing on farmers who "have no soil to till," who wanted to "get off relief and get back to the soil where they rightfully belong, and earn a living by the sweat of their brow, as God said to do." Throughout 1944 Whitfield made trips around Butler County to speak about the PIAR to church congregations, trips complicated by racism and anticommunism. Still, Whitfield recruited fifty black preachers for a PIAR event to be held on July 4, noting that such a feat was "a big day in the history of this county." (80)

The work of Whitfield and other PIAR organizers culminated in the Congress of Applied Religion, which met in July 1944 in Detroit. The previous year, the Detroit Presbytery recruited Williams for the position of "minister to labor," a job created to foster interracial brotherhood in a city with increasing racial tension. War industry jobs brought southern black and white migrants into a volatile social and political cauldron. Reactionary leaders like Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Coughlin had stirred up racial hatred, exposing pockets of fascism in the "arsenal of democracy." (81) The Presbytery hired Williams because of his passionate refusal to relinquish religion to the reactionaries and racists. And to Williams, no one embodied this progressive holiness more than Whitfield.

Owen and Zella left for Detroit in early July. Speakers at the conference included the Whitfields, Williams, and George Addes and R. J. Thomas of the United Auto Workers leadership. As a black southern leader with impressive oratory skills, Whitfield attracted many PIAR participants who came to hear the legendary organizer. With this expectation in mind, Williams wrote to Whitfield with suggestions for his speech: "I want you to pull off the gloves and put on the brass knucks. Tell what you thought your religion was. Tell the conditions you were in and the experiences you had when you thought religion only preparing to die. Tell what you have come to see religion is. Tell what it has done for the people down there.... We want you to speak about Dixie." Whitfield's talk, "A Sharecropper Discovers True Religion in the Peoples' Fight," did just what Williams asked. If religion had the power to unite southern sharecroppers, PIAR leaders concluded, then it could also unite industrial workers, many of whom had themselves worked cotton in their lifetimes. (82)

Having seen Williams enact a "worker's communion" in Detroit, Whitfield added it to his meetings in rural Missouri. The communion ceremony featured real wine (most pastors disdained drinking alcohol) and a makeshift cross (of benches) set up outdoors. At the meeting where he introduced the communion, Whitfield reported how the invited pastors sang in a "modified voice" with "their Eyes and Ears cocked like a bunch of Jackasses at a Jackass Convention." But after Whitfield assembled the cross, "you could feel their Knees Knocking." Pastors who had "preached Hellfire and Brimstone to anyone who dared to drink anything stronger than CoaCola [sic], for the last 15 years" chose to drink the wine over the grape juice at the foot of the cross. The reaction of these pastors, according to Whitfield, was remarkable. In just one year he organized PIAR councils in seven towns in Butler County and two in Mississippi County. (83)

Of course Whitfield may have exaggerated the stories of these conversions. After all, he wrote of these experiences to his old friend and ally Claude Williams, who also served as Whitfield's boss and financial benefactor. Williams paid Whitfield between twenty-five and fifty dollars a month for his work; therefore, Whitfield had practical reasons to exaggerate the success of the PIAR. (84) Whitfield also may have embellished stories of communion and conversion because his role as a preacher gave him license to construct parables rather than repeat actual experiences.

For example, Whitfield often told the tale of a white preacher who disrupted a PIAR meeting in Charleston, Missouri. This preacher, seeing a crowd of blacks under some trees, approached them just as Whitfield began to discuss a chart on the Antichrist. In the story, Whitfield quoted the "Nazarene carpenter" who said of false prophets: "'with their mouths they serve me but with the heart they are far from me.'" Just then, the white preacher choked on his chewing tobacco and "jumped up and let go with a long string of brown Tobacco juice, aimed direct at [Whitfield's] face." Seeing this happening, a Sister Simms stood up just in time to catch the tobacco on the brim of her white hat. "Mad through and through" about her soiled hat, Simms told the white preacher that Whitfield, not him, preached the true gospel. "Yes sir," she said. "[We] is learned lots and lots from you White Folks that why we aint got nuthing. [W]e learned to Liar, steal, doublecrosss each other." The source of evil, she said, came from false preachers who "lerned to preach from you and dats why we been in the dark all this time." (85)

The story of the white preacher reveals Whitfield's understanding of both the color line and class exploitation in America. Commending Simms for her comments (and wide hat), Whitfield stated that "this white man is not as free as we are." He explained that blacks eat in the white man's house and "sleep in his bed" (a reference to miscegenation) and "our People wont say a word." However, if "his people finds it out," Whitfield said, "they will tar and feather him." Whitfield deemed this hypocrisy the true nature of the color line. In conclusion, Whitfield related the twisted logic of Jim Crow back to true religion. "If [the white preacher] had sense enough," Whitfield claimed, "he would break down the race line and run for Office and be elected by the Negro Vote, the[n] he could be a true servant of God." Both whites and blacks suffered from a lack of freedom and piety because of the color line, which kept both poor. As Sister Simms told the white preacher, "you should be the one to be shamed [because] your Church members are so poor that you aint got a pot to Pis in.... den you come here telling us dat you supreme. Aint but one thing you supreme in," she concluded, "and that, spittin in a strait line." Having seen the light, the white preacher asked for PIAR literature to distribute at his church as the blacks in attendance erupted with "great rejoicing." (86)

For Whitfield and his followers, religion often provided cogent explanations compared to the irrational reality of Jim Crow. In this story, he stressed the possibility that even the most hated oppressor could mend the error of his ways and see the world in terms of class exploitation. To counteract "Pie-in-the-Sky" preachers who led blacks to accept their lot in life, Whitfield and Williams aimed to liberate the Christian church from the clutches of capitalism, which unless confronted would continue to "discredit, divide and destroy the mass movements of the people...." "The true class nature of our religious heritage," Williams preached, "was first revealed in a slave uprising in Egypt." The truth in Whitfield's parables, not unlike the Exodus, depended on the faith of the audience. (87)

The PIAR spread nationally in 1945 to places like New York and Chicago to accompany the massive rural southern migration that had occurred during the war. When possible, Whitfield attended meetings in these locations. (88) His correspondence with Williams diminished when Williams moved to Alabama in 1946 due to pressure from redbaiters. Meanwhile, Whitfield severed ties with the FTA (formerly UCAPAWA). The union asked him to travel outside Missouri again, but with the health of his wife unstable and his own health less than perfect, he declined the offer and stayed in Cropperville. (89) With his income and stature diminished, Whitfield began to look for opportunities elsewhere.

In search of a new institutional vehicle, Whitfield walked into the offices of the St. Louis Council of the NNC in 1946 to offer his services. After the war, Revels Cayton, a communist trade unionist from the West Coast, led a revival of the NNC. Councils that had diminished in size and stature took off again, including the one in St. Louis, whose leaders amassed two hundred dues-paying members by that fall. Whitfield offered "to work up and down the [Mississippi] River" so long as he would be able to check on his family in Cropperville once a week. To NNC activist Nathan Oser, Whitfield's reputation spoke for itself. Oser reported to the NNC office in New York that Whitfield knew the local "area better than any of us," and Oser concluded that Whitfield "doesn't need me or anyone else to tell him where to go and what to do." Organizers like Whitfield, Oser explained, were needed now more than ever. (90)

Only a few days earlier, William Howard, a black veteran, had been murdered in St. Louis. According to Oser, Howard stood in an alley talking to a friend when William Niggemann, an off-duty policeman, tried to drive through. Niggemann shouted obscenities at him for blocking his passage, and when Howard protested the need for such abusive language, Niggemann shot Howard in the stomach and drove off. Howard died at the hospital, and the patrolman was exonerated by claiming that Howard attacked him with a knife. When NNC members tried to organize a protest campaign in St. Louis, they ran into resistance. One black attorney suggested that the NNC should "teach Negro people not to swear, and to behave properly," while other attorneys-black and white--"do not recognise a lynching in their own back yards." Oser concluded, "If we had had Whitfield, it would have been so much better!" (91)

The NNC needed Whitfield, and Whitfield needed the NNC. Certifying Whitfield as its Missouri organizer, the NNC agreed to pay half of his $150 monthly salary for an initial three-month period. Whitfield focused his efforts on the election campaign of William Massingale, a black Democrat running for the state legislature. Massingale, a St. Louis resident, veteran of World War I, and CIO member since 1936, embodied the kind of progressive black politician the NNC and Whitfield believed crucial in the fight to bring rights to blacks in Missouri. But they needed to convince voters from the eleventh district of St. Louis, previously won by white candidates, to vote for a black man. Whitfield crafted campaign appeals and literature for Massingale aimed at St. Louis blacks. One pamphlet read, "It is time we stop being suckers for the politicians.... We must vote for THE MAN, NOT THE PARTY." As a Democratic candidate, NNC members explained, Massingale would fight for better housing, fair employment, and anti-lynching laws. Thanks in no small part to Whitfield, Massingale won. (92)

Yet, just as a coalition of progressive black activists began to coalesce in St. Louis, Whitfield disappeared. In late 1946 the St. Louis NNC, largely due to Whitfield's work, began to exert its influence, following up Massingale's victory with a mass meeting (featuring Fannie Cook and Massingale) to protest the Howard lynching as well as "jim-crowism and discrimination." But Whitfield's name was conspicuously absent from this list of speakers, and shortly afterward he went back to Cropperville without saying when he would return to St. Louis. (93)

Working in St. Louis had not inspired Whitfield the same way that UCAPAWA or the PIAR had. After a few months, he drifted out of the realm of the NNC, much to the chagrin of other black activists who wondered why he had not lived up to his iconic reputation. In addition, his previous connections to communists caught up with him. With the beginning of the Cold War, Whitfield's institutional resources--the FTA, the PIAR, and the NNC--either disbanded or had to cut back their operations. (94) Moreover, progressive New Deal agencies like the FSA were gutted by ascendant conservative forces. In March 1947 Whitfield reported that Cropperville residents had become "gloomy" when relief checks were cut in half. To earn enough money to support his family, he purchased a truck to haul and sell firewood. "It is tough," he wrote "but we gets by somehow and are very happy together, sharing our sweets and bitters." In January 1949 Cook and the CRS handed over control of Cropperville to a board of residents appointed by Whitfield. The following year, claiming the need for better schooling for their younger children, the Whitfields moved to Du Quinn, Illinois, where Owen became the pastor of the St. Paul Baptist Church. After four years there the family moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where he continued to preach. From 1961 until his death in 1965, Whitfield lived in Mounds, Illinois, preaching at the Pilgrim's Rest Baptist Church. Relinquishing the role of Moses, Whitfield spent the final fifteen years of his life as a humble rural preacher. (95)

Owen Whitfield's life illuminates the complex and unstable world of social protest outside conventional historical categories. While reliant on the STFU, UCAPAWA, the PIAR, and the NNC as important vehicles to produce social change, Whitfield never subscribed wholesale to their organizational missions. Not unlike the independent radicals who emerged from the Cold War to lead the next generation's black freedom struggle, Whitfield realized the dangers in allowing sectarian infighting and institutional survival to become driving forces for his activism. (96)

Instead, Whitfield reinterpreted and used religion--the vital source of legitimation for his alternate worldview. Dutifully plowing fields or working ten hours in a factory required a tremendous amount of faith in the value of those tasks. For Whitfield, these tasks became connected to God, especially through the example of Jesus as a radical working-class carpenter. Whitfield succeeded in organizing all types of workers because he based his message on the dignity of labor. He united them as workers in righteous opposition to elite attempts to strip them of their opportunities to pursue their vocations (or, literally, their calling). Defense of work and the working class became ultimately a moral obligation for Whitfield--to stand up for laborers was to stand up for one's religious belief.

Without this constant interaction with sharecroppers from Missouri, Whitfield never would have been able to develop or legitimate an ideology that challenged the status quo at the highest levers of power. Even at the height of his UCAPAWA work in southern urban areas, Whitfield "reserved the right to stick with our people in the camp." These people represented his source of strength. Their needs became his needs to such an extent that he risked the self-sufficiency of his own family for the sake of the larger community of dispossessed farmers. Whitfield sought action to remedy the immediate circumstances of sharecroppers, but he also offered them a much larger vision of religious piety and salvation through service to God on earth. Only through this "uphill journey," Whitfield realized, would he have the right to complain about his lot in life and enact means by which to change the conditions that threatened the existence of both his own family and his broader congregation of exploited workers. (97)

As an activist and preacher, Whitfield pulled together different strands of his experience to foment action. He defined the New Deal in a radically different way than Franklin Roosevelt and forced the federal government to take seriously the complaints of the workers whom Whitfield represented. This "army of food producers" (toilers in the soil as well as industrial processing workers) was entitled to government protection from labor exploitation from the "Bosses" so that they could become useful citizens. (98) During World War II, Whitfield argued that Roosevelt's Four Freedoms needed immediate application in the Jim Crow South in addition to fascist nations abroad. Increasingly after 1945, Cold War politics stalled the momentum of the networks that Whitfield relied upon as vehicles for his politics as well as his economic survival. While the last years of his life represent a retreat from the role of a Moses to that of a rural preacher, he never abandoned his belief in the revolutionary power of religion.

Whitfield's radical interpretations of religion, race relations, and economics were not easy to maintain. Whitfield's PIAR ally Claude Williams suggested that preachers should take the Bible and underline in red pencil all worthy passages and in black pencil all passages that would defeat or confuse. (99) Whitfield did not literally perform this task, but his life's work shows how he was shaped by the past and also how he continually used this past to formulate opposition. In his mind, Whitfield drew and erased lines to reshape his worldview. He imagined and told conversion stories that were fictive fables rather than true experiences. He retold the history of Missouri organizing campaigns during the Great Depression, eliding the vital STFU networks that supported his activism. And he often took sole credit for victories that others helped create. Yet, these distortions are part of the creative process of sustaining collective memory. Whitfield analyzed new circumstances and learned through experiences how he should present himself to a wide variety of audiences. His experiences with socialists and communists, federal and state government officials, religious thinkers, and rural and urban workers provided him with a multitude of contexts to understand that race and class were inextricably linked in the struggle for power. Further, he learned how urban centers connected to rural outposts, how political ideologies related to religious teachings, and how government policies and larger processes far outside the local arena circumscribed his people.

Understanding Whitfield changes our understandings of larger historical movements as well. The 1939 roadside demonstration no longer appears as a spontaneous uprising; the partisan infighting between UCAPAWA and the STFU no longer dominates the historical narrative of agrarian organizing; the rural and urban experiences of African American laborers appear more connected; and the social gospel message Whitfield preached helps explain why many rural southern black churches became so active in the 1960s civil rights movement. (100) Furthermore, Whitfield's life and work remind us that black agricultural labor was not a lost cause but a way of life full of meaning and tradition. With the power of shared religious belief, the bracing importance of family and community ties, and faith in the value of hard work, Whitfield armed the heretofore powerless to resist their repression and mount a grassroots struggle for social and economic justice. Theirs was a fight to claim the redemptive, democratic promises of emancipation and the American political tradition, a legacy that would continue to inform civil rights unionists in the 1940s. (101) In important ways, the collapse of Whitfield's career as an activist mirrored the demise of larger class-based movements for racial equality, rural and industrial. All were decimated by the tectonic shifts that reordered the national political landscape in this period: the ascendant power of southern white elites, the rise of domestic anticommunism, and the retreat into postwar prosperity and consumerism. That outcome, however, should not diminish Whitfield's achievements. His work shows us how democratic alternatives spring from the same American soil that produces dominant systems of racial discrimination and labor exploitation. Because above all else, Whitfield was a soil tiller, and his experience as such illuminates both the complexity of the tiller as well as the richness of the soil.

(1) Franklin D. Roosevelt, "The 'Forgotten Man' Speech. Radio Address, Albany, N.Y., April 7, 1932," in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt.... Vol. I: The Genesis of the New Deal, 1928-1932 (New York, 1938), 624-25 (quotation on p. 625).

(2) The most thorough account of the demonstration and its aftermath is Louis Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 (Durham, N.C., 1969). For contemporary descriptions see St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939; Sikeston (Mo.) Standard, January 13, 1939; "Army of Sharecroppers Trek from Homes; Protest Missouri Landlords' Wage Plans," New York Times, January 11, 1939, p. 6; and H. L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H. L. Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (Montclair, N.J., 1979), 172. Also see Thad Snow's autobiography, From Missouri (Boston, 1954), 240-42. For a detailed discussion of representations of the protest see Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville, 1992), 3-4, 113-41. For a more recent account of the demonstration, see Jarod H. Roll, "The 1939 Roadside Demonstration and the Politics of Landscape in Southeast Missouri, 1920-1939" (paper presented to the Forty-Fifth Missouri Conference on History, Southeast Missouri State University, April 2003).

(3) While historians have recently focused on rural black protest in the decades leading up to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, few scholars have explained rural black organization as a defense of the meaningful aspects of black lives and labors on the land--the inheritance of rural social and political aspirations stretching back to the heyday of Radical Reconstruction and beyond. Whitfield was not anticipating the civil rights movement but rather struggling to defend and hold together a way of life under withering assault. The most important of these works include Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Greta de Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana. 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill, 2002); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); and, powerful despite its age. Mark D. Naison, "Black Agrarian Radicalism in the Great Depression: The Threads of a Lost Tradition," Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1 (Fall 1973). 47-65. All focus heavily on rural black ideological or political allegiance, particularly to communists and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, rather than focusing on the stronger political interpretations emerging from grassroots tradition. Kelley's account is more nuanced than the others and stresses how Alabama blacks interpreted communism through the traditional inheritance and collective memory that gave meaning to their lives.

(4) For discussions of the political and social importance of the institutional black church, especially after emancipation, see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 230-34; and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (1973; 3rd ed., Maryknoll, N.Y., 1998), 140-62.

(5) Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York, 1998), 228. Aldon D. Morris's cogent study, while acknowledging religion as central to black civil rights, treats it less as an ideology than as an institution. He argues that black urban churches and their college-educated ministers led the movement from this resource base. See Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984), xii-xiii, 5, 8, 19, 79. Exceptions to this trend include Alex Lichtenstein, "Introduction: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union; A Movement for Social Emancipation," in Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers (1936; reprint, Knoxville, 1997), 37-40; and Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill, 1971), 65-69. These and other accounts have credited the involvement of black churches in the STFU mainly to the policies of Mitchell and other leaders, who aimed to take advantage of rural black religiosity as a tool to recruit for the union rather than as a potential source of grassroots radical creation within black communities. Recent works that overlook the complex roles of rural black religion include Mark Fannin, Labor's Promised Land: Radical Visions of Gender. Race, and Religion in the South (Knoxville, 2003), 288-300; de Jong, Different Day, 53-54; Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, chap. 7; Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N.C., 1997), 210-40; James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York, 1992), 180; and Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens, Ga., 1987), 14. In contrast, considerable attention has been given to radical religious teaching among southern whites in this period. See, most notably, Fannin, Labor's Promised Land, 292-97; Lichtenstein, "Introduction," 37-40; Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 (Charlottesville, 1981), passim; and William H. Cobb and Donald H. Grubbs, "Arkansas' Commonwealth College and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 25 (Winter 1966), 293-311. The proliferation of conservative or reactionary religious thought in the 1930s has also been widely covered. See, for example, Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith, Minister of Hate (1988; new ed., Baton Rouge, 1997); and Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1982).

(6) Whitfield's career encapsulates the process of "social learning" that Robert Korstad rightly sees at the root of black labor activism in the tobacco industry in the mid-1940s. See Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century, South (Chapel Hill, 2003), 2. Michael Honey alludes to similar rural-urban connections in his study of CIO members in Memphis. See Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1993). Other historians tend to divide this period along rural and urban lines. For excellent works that focus on urban, industrial organization during the New Deal see Beth T. Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana, 2000); and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990). For those that deal with rural organizing see Fannin, Labor's Promised Land; Woodruff, American Congo; de Jong, Different Day; and Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton.

(7) Honey, Southern Labor; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; Cohen, Making a New Deal; Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996); Kelley, Hummer and Hoe; and Grubbs, Cry from the Conon. are examples of scholarship that has collectively redefined how historians think about civil rights and labor during the New Deal era though their analyses of single regions, organizations, or political parties.

(8) Jean D. Cadle, "'Cropperville' from Refuge to Community: A Study of Missouri Sharecroppers Who Found an Alternative to the Sharecropper System" (M.A. thesis, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1993), 14-16.

(9) For Whitfield's early life, see Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 16; Cantor, Prologue, 30: Cedric Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," Harper's Magazine, 197 (November 1948), 96-98. In 1923 the seven southeast Missouri counties were in the midst of a dramatic economic and social revolution. Collapsing markets for wheat and corn after 1920 encouraged area landlords to experiment with cotton, which proved wildly successful. Responding to the new opportunities of available land, tens of thousands of black families swept into the Bootheel to secure rental and sharecropping arrangements. See Leon Parker Ogilvie, "The Development of the Southeast Missouri Lowlands" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1967), passim.

(10) Blacks formed fourteen UNIA divisions in the Bootheel, three within a ten-mile radius in Whitfield's area of Mississippi County. Robert A. Hill, Barbara Bair, and Edith Johnson, eds., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Vol. VII: November 1927-August 1940 (Berkeley, 1990), 991; "Charleston, Missouri," New York Negro World, December 15, 1923; "Charleston, Mo.," ibid., August 7, 1926; and "Wyatt, MO," ibid., December 8, 1928. For a more detailed discussion of rural Garveyism, see Mary G. Rolinson, "The Garvey Movement in the Rural South, 1920-1927" (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia State University, 2002) and Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 469-73. On the Whitfields' crop yield, see Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 97.

(11) Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 96-98: Cantor, Prologue, 31-32.

(12) Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge, 1987), 60-65: Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton. Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana, 1985), 92-106: Gilbert C. Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980 (Lexington. Ky., 1984). 128-31; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge, 1978), 17-44.

(13) For more on the black churches and notions of respectability, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), especially chap. 7: and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996).

(14) "Rich Land. Poor People," 11. 44-45, and "The Church." Southeast Missouri Study Project Notes, 1-14, both in Report File on the Southeast Missouri Study, Entry 52, Records of the Office of the Director, Region Three, Records of the Farmers Home Administration, Record Group 96, National Archives and Records Administration (hereinafter cited as NARA), Great Lakes Region, Chicago, Ill.; and Margaret L. Bright, "'Farm Wage Workers in Four Southeast Missouri Cotton-Producing Counties" (M.A. thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1944), 201-5. The growth of "new-sect" black churches in urban areas has been covered far more than its rural counterpart. See Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana, 1999), 172-76; Phillips, "Making a Church Home: African-American Migrants, Religion, and Working-Class Activism," in Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie, eds., Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (Urbana, 1998), 230-51; and Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 170-72.

(15) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 1942. In late 1933 the OIBAPMW split from the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, itself a fringe Garveyite movement formed in Chicago in late 1932 by a Filipino named Ashima Takis. Both groups attracted Garveyites in Chicago and St. Louis disaffected with the UNIA. For more detailed accounts of OIBAPMW and PMEW activity see Ernest Allen Jr., "Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932 1943," Gateway Heritage, 15 (Fall 1994), 18-22; Allen, "When Japan Was 'Champion of the Darker Races': Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism," Black Scholar, 24 (Winter 1994), 23-46; and Charleston (Mo.) Enterprise-Courier, May 3, 1934. H. L. Mitchell reported that Whitfield had organized for the OIBAPMW in Mississippi County in 1934 but had quit once Takis's subversive ideas became clearer. Although Whitfield's involvement is not mentioned elsewhere, Mitchell's account is tar too detailed to be dismissed, despite his antipathies for Whitfield at the time and incentives to link him with pro-Japanese elements. H. L. Mitchell to David Burgess, ca. 1945, Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Papers #3472 (Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; microfilm ed., 60 reels; Glen Rock, N.J., 1971 ; hereinafter cited as STFU Papers), microfilm, reel 31. Moreover, Whitfield frequently talked about the group in the 1940s, often suggesting his own close involvement. See, for example, Owen H. Whitfield to Mrs. Julia Katz, Director of Women's Auxiliaries, Washington, D.C., December 16, 1941, Papers of the National Negro Congress (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; microfilm ed., 94 reels; Frederick, Md., 1988), microfilm, part 3, reel 7, frames 679-81; hereinafter cited as NNC Papers.

(16) John Handcox to H. L. Mitchell, September 28, 1936, STFU Papers, reel 3. Two white socialists founded the union in 1934, but it quickly became an interracial organization at the grassroots level. The STFU mainly protested the abuse of AAA laws, organizing strikes among its members. Three years later, the STFU reported 1,373 members in twenty Missouri locals, mostly in Mississippi County. "Membership Report, STFU Third Annual Convention Minutes, January 14-17, 1937," STFU Papers, reel 4. For more on the STFU see Fannin, Labor's Promised Land, esp. p. 56; Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton; and Howard Kester, Revolt Among the Sharecroppers. For more on Handcox, see Rebecca B. Schroeder and Donald M. Lance, "John L. Handcox: 'The Sharecropper Troubadour,'" 126-31, Folder 4, Bootheel Project Records, C3928 (Western Historical Manuscripts Collection Columbia, Ellis Library, University of Missouri-Columbia; hereinafter cited as WHMC-Columbia). Many of these white followers of a radical gospel, including Williams, were connected to Vanderbilt Theological Seminary. See Dunbar, Against the Grain, vii-viii (quotation on p. vii), 28-32. Whitfield reportedly said of Williams before hearing him, "What can that white pecker wood say to me?" Naison, "Black Agrarian Radicalism," 58-59 (quotation on p. 59); Cantor, Prologue, 31; and Dunbar, Against the Grain, 177.

(17) Cantor, Prologue, 31-32: Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 16.

(18) Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 97 (all quotations). Slightly different versions of Whitfield's conversion story can be found in Howard Emerson, Interview with Owen Whitfield, March 1963, in Emerson, "The Sharecroppers' Strike, 1939" (Senior honors thesis, Southeast Missouri State College, 1963), 38; and Owen Whitfield to Eleanor Roosevelt, January 2, 1940, Folder We-Wh, 1940, Box 348, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York).

(19) Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 97 (all quotations). For more on African American religious beliefs see Patterson, Rituals of Blood, 230-31; Albert J. Raboteau, "African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel," in Paul E. Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity: Essays in History (Berkeley, 1994), 1-17; Clayborne Carson, "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the African-American Social Gospel," in Johnson, ed., African-American Christianity, 159-77; and C. Eric Lincoln, "The Black Heritage in Religion in the South," in Charles Reagan Wilson, ed., Religion in the South (Jackson, Miss., 1985).

(20) Charleston Enterprise-Courier. February 11, 1930, and Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian, March 31, 1930, both in Folder 105, Box FC 2.1 (Regional Newspaper Clippings Collection, Special Collections and Archive, Kent Library, Southeast Missouri State University): House Committee on Flood Control, 70 Cong.. 2 Sess., Flood Control: Report of Mississippi River Flood Control Board to the President (Comm. Print: Washington, D.C., 1928), 6; Edison Shrum, Super Floods Raging in Wide Spread Area: The Scott County Democrat's Account of the 1937 Mississippi-New Madrid County Jadwin Floodway Disaster ([Benton, Mo.], 1994): Charleston Enterprise-Courier, January-February 1927.

(21) The American National Red Cross effort in 1937 was even led from RA offices, leading observers to conflate the two. Paul E. Parker, A Portrait of Missouri. 1935-1943: Photographs from the Farm Security Administration (Columbia, Mo., 2002). 55-56. See also Russell Lee, photographer, "During the 1937 flood, most of the Resettlement Administration office was turned," Farm Security Administration--Office of War Information Photograph Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-010470-D (Prints and Photographs Division. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html). On the aftermath of the 1927 flood see [American National Red Cross], The Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927: Official Report of the Relief Operations (Washington, D.C., [1929]); "Preliminary Health Report of Southeastern Missouri Flood Area With Recommendations, 19 April 1927," Box 738, Group 2, Central File, 1917-1934. American National Red Cross Records (National Archives at College Park. College Park. Maryland). In charge of local Red Cross committees, landlords throughout the flood- and drought-affected areas used relief to bind rural workers, particularly blacks, into further dependence and debt bondage in 1927 and 1930 1931. See Robyn Spencer, "Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor," Journal of Negro History, 79 (Spring 1994), 170-81; Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, As Rare as Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern Drought of 1930-31 (Urbana, 1985), passim; and Pete Daniel, Deep 'N As it Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (New York, 1977), 91-108.

(22) "Minutes of the Official Council of the S.T.F.U.," February 15, 1937, STFU Papers, reel 4.

(23) John Handcox to J. R. Butler, April 8, 1937 (first quotation); Owen Whitfield to J. R. Butler, June 15, 1937 (second and third quotations), STFU Papers, reel 4.

(24) In 1937 the Communist Party and the CIO combined a number of previously independent unions--ranging from tenant farmers to food-processing workers--into a single umbrella union called UCAPAWA. John L. Lewis of the CIO provided the funding for a union drive and Donald Henderson, a white communist from New York, headed the union. See Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque, 1987) and Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism. For Whitfield's involvement in the founding convention see "Convention Proceedings, Third Annual Convention, STFU, January 1937," STFU Papers. reel 4. In an interview in the early 1960s Whitfield claimed that he alone hitchhiked to the CIO convention and begged UCAPAWA to help his people in southeast Missouri. The available evidence from the STFU papers shows that Whitfield went as part of the larger STFU delegation and rode to Denver with J. R. Butler, STFU president, and William Blackstone. See J. R. Butler to Owen Whitfield, July 1, 1937, STFU Papers, reel 5; and Emerson, "Sharecroppers' Strike," 40.

(25) W. M. Harvey to J. R. Butler, August 16, 1937, reel 5 (quotations): "Fairview Local, UCAPAWA Charter, November 6, 1937"; "Diehlstadt Local, Monthly Report, November 23, 1937": "Holland Local Questionnaire, July 7, 1937"; "Caruthersville Local 303, Local Questionnaire, July 3, 1937": "Caruthersville Local 310 Secretaries Report, July 26, 1937": "N J Corner Local Secretaries Report, October 8, 1937": "Anniston Local Secretaries Report, September 17, 1937," all on reel 6: "Proceedings of the STFU Fourth Annual Convention," 1937, reel 7: "Fourth Annual Convention Proceedings, 1938," reel 7: "Organization Fees, July 1937," reel 5: and "Locals of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union," undated 1937, reel 6, all in STFU Papers.

(26) Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty, 44: Charleston Enterprise-Courier, December 23, 1937 (quotations).

(27) Charleston Enterprise-Courier, December 23, 1937 (first, second, third, fourth, and fifth quotations); Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, December 27, 1937, STFU Papers, reel 4 (sixth and seventh quotations); Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, January 10, 1938, and Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, January 22, 1938 (eighth quotation), both in STFU Papers, reel 7; Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, December 27, 1937, STFU Papers, reel 4 (ninth quotation); Thad Snow to Charles Ross, January 2, 1938, Folder 2, Box 1, Thad Snow Papers, SL 88 (Western Historical Manuscripts Collection--St. Louis, Thomas Jefferson Library, University of Missouri--St. Louis); Owen Whitfield to Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 5, 1938 (tenth quotation), as quoted in Ogilvie, "Development of Southeast Missouri Lowlands," 288--89 (quotation on p. 289), 476n51.

(28) Memorandum for the Attorney General: Investigation Concerning the Sharecropper Situation Existing in Southeast Missouri (Washington, D.C., 1939), 22-23 (copy in Doe and Moffitt Libraries, University of California, Berkeley).

(29) Cantor, Prologue. 32; Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 83-85; Charleston Enterprise-Courier, December 23, 1937; Memorandum for the Attorney General, 23.

(30) This growth made Missouri the third-largest state in STFU-CIO strength behind Arkansas and Oklahoma. See "Resolutions Adopted by Fifth Convention," January 1, 1939, STFU Papers, reel 9: Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell. March 28, 1938, STFU Papers, reel 7 (quotation). We use the term STFU-CIO to refer to the movement subsequent to STFU affiliation with UCAPAWA. The combined acronym more accurately captures the mobilizing strategy of Whitfield and better explains the enthusiasm among working-class followers than does using the traditional STFU. All references to STFU-CIO herein refer to the organizing period from late 1937 to the split between STFU and UCAPAWA in mid-939.

(31) "La Forge Farms," Box 411, Entry 4A, Project Records, 1935-1940, Missouri, Records of the Farm Security Administration and Predecessor Agencies, Record Group 96, National Archives at College Park (hereinafter cited as RG 96, National Archives at College Park); "'Second Anniversary, La Forge Farms Resettlement Project, 20 December 1939," Folder 772, O. R. Johnson Papers, 1910-1959, C3483 (WHMC-Columbia); Stuart Chase, "From the Lower Depths: Condensed from Free America," Reader's Digest, 38 (May 1941), 109-11: East Prairie (Mo.) Eagle, March 25, 1938; and Sikeston Standard, March 22, 1938, and July 1, 1938. For more on the FSA and its rural rehabilitation work in the South see Brenda J. Taylor, "The Farm Security Administration and Rural Families in the South: Home Economists, Nurses, and Farmers, 1933-46," in Elna C. Green, ed., The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare in the South since 1930 (Athens, Ga., 2003), 30-35; Michael R. Grey, New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Programs of the Farm Security Administration (Baltimore, 1999), 63-99; Donald Holley, Uncle Sam's Farmers: The New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Urbana, 1975), ix-x, 134-35; and, most importantly, Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill, 1968), vii-ix, 194-214.

(32) Bonnie Stepenoff, Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel (Columbia, 2003), 81-82; Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 18; Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 99. A later report stated that Whitfield was chosen because he successfully repaid his federal loan after the flood crisis of 1937 and was considered a stable and successful farmer. Memorandum for the Attorney General, 36-37; Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell and J. R. Butler, June 6, 1938, STFU Papers, reel 8.

(33) Mildred G. Freedman, "Ten Million Sharecroppers," Crisis, 46 (December 1939), 367-68. La Forge blended calls for individual landownership with more radical proposals for wholly cooperative cotton-farming communities, such as the STFU advocated. Whitfield never came around completely to the STFU's model, maintaining some measure of attachment to his Garveyite experience in the early 1920s, which sought individual landownership through mutual support. For the STFU's perspective see Mitchell, Mean Things, 124-36; and Fannin, Labor's Promised Land, 104, 120-21.

(34) UCAPAWA efforts to fit the STFU into the CIO mold included raising membership dues, paying those dues directly to UCAPAWA, and removing autonomy from the STFU, as well as adopting a more overt political line, which many feared would be laced with communism. UCAPAWA raised its dues to sixty cents in 1938, an impossible sum for landless farmers to pay. See Dunbar, Against the Grain, 155-57, 166-77:"1938 Convention Proceedings," STFU Papers, reel 8 (first five quotations); and "Executive Council Meeting, May 21st.-May 22nd [1938]," STFU Papers, reel 8 (sixth and seventh quotation).

(35) Dunbar, Against the Grain, 167-68; Cobb and Grubbs, "Arkansas' Commonwealth College and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union," 307-11.

(36) Owen Whitfield to John T. Clark, Urban League of St. Louis, August 3, 1938, Folder 15, Box 7, Series 1, Fannie Frank Cook Papers (Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis).

(37) Emerson, "Sharecroppers' Strike," 41; Memorandum for the Attorney General, 22-24; Stepenoff, Thad Snow, 89. Whitfield may have gleaned the concept of the roadside demonstration from the numerous CIO sit-down strikes in the late 1930s or from a very small roadside demonstration that occurred during a cotton-picking strike of STFU members in Arkansas in 1936. Cantor, Prologue, 57-58.

(38) For more details see Jarod H. Roll, "Road to the Promised Land: Rural Rebellion in the New Cotton South, 1890-1945 (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, forthcoming 2006).

(39) Charleston Enterprise-Courier, October 20, 1938; Owen Whitfield to the Charleston (Mo.) Democrat, October 16, 1938, Folder 32, Box 2, Snow Papers; Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, December 1, 1938, STFU Papers, reel 9 (quotation); Memorandum for the Attorney General, 24; "Who's Who in Our Union: O. H. Whitfield," UCAPAWA News, July 1939, p. 2; Cantor, Prologue, 54-55; "Program, Dedication of Southeast Missouri Project of Farm Security Administration and the Christmas Festival of the LaFurge Cooperative Association, December 1938," Box 412, Entry 4A, RG 96, National Archives at College Park (song titles).

(40) J. R. Butler to Owen Whitfield, December 24, 1938, STFU Papers, reel 9; J. R. Butler to Owen Whitfield, January 7, 1939, STFU Papers, reel 10: and Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, December 30, 1938, STFU Papers, reel 9.

(41) Many of the eventual demonstrators had lived in the spillway and had been refugees in January 1937. Cantor, Prologue, 50-152, 60-61; Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 20; Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 100; Stepenoff, Thad Snow, 90; Memorandum for the Attorney General, 25. Though Snow urged that Armstrong report the story, Whitfield made Armstrong promise prior to the meeting not to print anything he heard later that night, claiming it would threaten the outcome of the protest. Just before the meeting, however, Whitfield changed his mind and gave Armstrong permission to run the story, which appeared on the front page of the January 8, 1939, edition of the Post-Dispatch.

(42) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1939 (quotations); Whitfield, interview by Emerson, in Emerson, "Sharecroppers' Strike," 41-43; Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 94-95; Cantor, Prologue, 60-61.

(43) Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 29-31: Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, January 10, 1939 (first quotation), AI Murphy to Owen Whitfield, January 9, 1939, Howard Kester to H. L. Mitchell, January 27, 1939, all three in STFU Papers, reel 10; Memorandum for the Attorney General, 23 (second and third quotations); Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian January 17, 1939; H. L. Mitchell to Gardner Jackson, January 30, 1939, Gardner Jackson to H. L. Mitchell, February 1, 1939, H. L. Mitchell to Gardner Jackson, February 3, 1939, all three in Folder "Mitchell, H. L., 1938-40," Box 49, Gardner Jackson Papers (Roosevelt Presidential Library); Cantor, Prologue, 79-80, 95, 97-98.

(44) St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 14, 1939 (first quotation); Cantor, Prologue, 86-87; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 15, 1939 (second quotation); Owen Whitfield to Thurgood Marshall, January 24, 1939 (third and fourth quotations), S. R. Redmond to Thurgood Marshall, February 6, 1939, Thurgood Marshall to S. R. Redmond, February 14, 1939, all in Folder "Southern Tenant Farmers Union--Jan. 23-Dec. 20, 1939," Container 406, Series C--Administrative Files, 1910-1940, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; hereinafter cited as NAACP Papers); Owen Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, February 15, 1939, STFU Papers, reel 10: Charleston Enterprise-Courier, April 30, 1939; Stepenoff, Thad Snow, 99.

(45) Owen Whitfield to Thurgood Marshall, January 24, 1939, Folder "Southern Tenant Farmers Union--Jan. 23-Dec. 20, 1939," Container 406, NAACP Papers.

(46) Daniel McClenton to J. R. Butler, January 24, 1939; Owen Whitfield to all locals in Missouri STFU, February 5, 1939 (quotation); Alonzo Julien to J. R. Butler, February 20, 1939; "Report of Relief Distribution in Southeast Missouri, January 10 February 18, 1939; all in STFU Papers, reel 10; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 19 and 20, 1939; Snow, From Missouri, 281; Cantor, Prologue, 78, 81, 89-90.

(47) Owen Whitfield to all locals in Missouri STFU, February 5, 1939 (quotations); Owen Whitfield to All STFU Officers and Members in Missouri, February 11, 1939, both in STFU Papers, reel 10.

(48) Cantor, Prologue, 95-105 (quotation on p. 99): Owen Whitfield to F. R. Betton, February 27, 1939, STFU Papers, reel 10.

(49) Owen Whitfield to All Locals and Members of the STFU, February 24, 1939, STFU Papers, reel 10 (quotations). Historians have previously paid little attention to the importance of Whitfield's belief in his own leadership responsibility and the centrality of the local union movement to the roadside demonstration. Rather, they have concluded that he was either duped by communists or that communist support was integral to the demonstration's strenth. See Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, 180-84; and Cantor, Prologue, passim. As might be expected, Mitchell argued that Whitfield had been duped by the communists in UCAPAWA. See Mitchell, Mean Things, 170-81.

(50) "Butler, Mitchell Removed from UCAPAWA and CIO: Facts Concerning So-Called STFU-UCAPAWA Split," UCAPAWA News, July 1939, pp. 12-13: Cantor, Prologue, 121: Membership Referendum, Local 385, March 5, 1939: Membership Referendum, Local 502, March 7, 1939; Membership Referendum, Local 380, March 8, 1939; Membership Referendum, Local 515, March 22, 1939: and F. L. Thompson to J. R. Butler, March 17, 1939, all in STFU Papers, reel 11.

(51) Fannie Cook reported to Eleanor Roosevelt that the people in the northern camps "turned against the STFU because they felt the STFU did not stand by them with courage or loyalty during the January 1939 demonstration and because in general they had lost confidence in the STFU leadership." Fannie Cook to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 8, 1939, Box 411, Entry 4A, RG 96, National Archives at College Park.

(52) Owen Whitfield, "What Was Done at the Convention of the Missouri Agricultural Workers' Council," Spring 1939, Folder 3, Box 6, Series 1, Cook Papers.

(53) "Lest you Forget!" Folder 32, Box 2, Snow Papers; Gov. Stark Asks Landowners to Delay Evictions," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 6, 1940, p. 5A; "Sharecroppers Stay on Day of Eviction," ibid., January 10, 1940, p. 3A; "Stark Requests Second Delay in Farm Evictions," ibid., February 2, 1940, p. 9A. The FSA built the homes in late 1940 and rented them at reasonable rates to the families, who raised their own garden crops and provided field labor for neighboring plantations. Although the project did not immediately secure the families land of their own, it did provide them with sound housing, sanitary facilities, garden plots, agricultural education, community centers, and access to nearby wage labor. "Release on Eight Group Homes Totaling 502 Farm Workers' Homes," June 15, 1940, Folder 1954, Lloyd C. Stark Papers, C0004 (WHMC-Columbia). See also David Burgess, "A Brief History of the Delmo Housing Corporation, 194565," David S. Burgess Papers, part 4 of The Green Rising, 1910-1977: A Supplement to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union Papers (microfilm, 17 reels; Glen Rock, N.J., 1977), reel 17; and W. Wilder Towle, "'The Story of Delmo," Bulletin--Missouri Historical Society, 36 (April 1980), 162-67. After congressional conservatives gutted the FSA in 1943, a consortium of donors headed by Mitchell and Burgess, a religious reformer, bought the homes from the government and then sold them to the families occupying them at reasonable rates of interest. See Memphis Press-Scimitar, November 29, 1945. Delmo proved to be a lasting success. In 1994, 80 percent of the homes were still owned by the original resident families. Alex Cooper, Portageville, Missouri, interview by unknown researcher, March 11, 1994, A.C. 3, Side A, Bootheel Project Records.

(54) Cadle, "'Cropperville.'" 39-43; O. H. Whitfield and John Day, "Missouri Roadside Demonstrators Struggle for Life in Their Own Camp," UCAPAWA News, September 1939, p. 6; William R. Fisher, "Missouri," ibid., October 1939, p. 5; "We Want Food, Not Money," ibid., October 1939, p. 13; "Missouri Council Buys Land for Union Camp," ibid., December 1939, p. 7. While the St. Louis-based CRS owned the Cropperville land, the residents built their own homes using timber from the land, planted garden crops for food, and raised small patches of cotton to sell for cash. The Cropperville residents elected their own community council with rules for those who lived there, organized a cotton cooperative to market the crop, and canned produce for use in the winter.

(55) Emerson, "'Sharecroppers' Strike," 56; Cantor, Prologue, 97-98. Whitfield's meeting in the White House in 1939 was arranged by Mitchell and the STFU. In February 1940 be returned to Washington, meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt in conjunction with his attendance at UCAPAWA's National Cotton Conference, which was called to protest the still-worsening conditions for cotton workers. He combined the second meeting, as he had the first, with a series of speaking engagements across the North. See Ralph Ellison, "Camp Lost Colony," New Masses, 34 (February 6, 1940), 18-19.

(56) In Chicago, for example, he spoke to the Workers Alliance, to students at Northwestern University, to progressive blacks at the Church of the Good Shepherd on the South Side, to the Sharecropper Relief Committee at the University of Chicago, and to religious students at Garrett Theological Seminary. See "Croppers' Leader in Chicago Today," Chicago Daily Record, January 28, 1939, p. 3.

(57) Whitfield was in distinguished company: Joe Louis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, and Richard Wright were among the other awardees. See "First Lady Named for Aid to Negroes: La Guardia Also Honored for Distinguished Achievement for Better Race Relations," New York Times, February 14, 1940, p. 13.

(58) Sikeston Standard, February 9, 1940.

(59) "Address of Reverend Owen H. Whitfield before the Third National Negro Congress," Washington, D.C., April 27, 1940. Folder "'National Negro Congress. 1940-1947," Subseries C, Part 18, NAACP Papers, microfilm, reel 1.

(60) Ibid. (third, fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations): Ralph Ellison, "A Congress Jim Crow Didn't Attend," New Masses, May 14, 1940, pp. 5-8 (first and second quotations on p. 8). The activists in the audience included John L. Lewis, the head of the burgeoning Congress of Industrial Organizations: Hank Johnson, an organizer of black steelworkers and packinghouse workers in Chicago: and Asa Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

(61) O. H. Whitfield and John Day, "Missouri Roadside Demonstrators Struggle for Life in Their Own Camp," UCAPAWA News, September 1939, p. 6.

(62) "2,500 At Missouri Meeting," UCAPAWA News, May-June 1940, pp. 1, 16; "Union Doubles Cotton Picking Pay," ibid., October 27, 1941 (first quotation); "Fight for 30c Wage Floor Gains Momentum," UCAPAWA News, May 28, 1942, p. 8 (second quotation). Planters often pressured government agencies to purge the relief rolls during cotton-picking season to ensure a plentiful, cheap labor supply. In 1938, pickers launched a strike to protest this tactic. The strike, which Whitfield opposed, failed. This time, however, the cuts came during the slack season, and the sharecroppers had no recourse.

(63) Honey, Southern Labor, 146 (first quotation); "Proceedings," 1940, UCAPAWA Third Annual Convention, Chicago, 61, brochure, Wisconsin Historical Society, as cited in ibid., 129 (second, third, and fourth quotations), 320n25; "2,500 At Missouri Meeting," UCAPAWA News, May--June 1940, pp. 1, 16; "Fight for 30c Wage Floor Gains Momentum," ibid., May 28, 1942, p. 8 (fifth quotation).

(64) Mark Naison, "Claude and Joyce Williams: Pilgrims of Justice," Southern Exposure, 1 (Winter 1974), 45-47 (quotation on p. 46); Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 152.

(65) The STFU executive council expelled Williams in 1938 for alleged communist subversion, a move Whitfield supported. William M. Fischer, a white STFU member from Mississippi County and later a leader of Cropperville, replaced Williams on the STFU's executive council at Whitfield's urging. See Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, 174-75; and Minutes of National Executive Council Meeting, September 16-17, 1938, STFU Papers, reel 9.

(66) Ben Morris Ridpath, "The Case of the Missouri Sharecroppers," Christian Century, 56 (February 1, 1939), 148 (quotation); Naison, "Claude and Joyce Williams," 38-50.

(67) Honey, Southern Labor, 131-34; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 150-52.

(68) Owen Whitfield to "THE SOUTH'S MOST HATED PREACHER" [Claude Williams], November 2, 1942, Folder 24, Box 15, Claude C. Williams Collection (Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library. Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; hereinafter cited as Williams Papers) (first through tenth quotations); Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, December 3, 1942, ibid. (eleventh quotation): Honey, Southern Labor. 186. Koger had become radicalized through his participation in a strike of black shrimp workers in Texas in which one striker was killed. He then helped organize tenant farmers in East Texas. For more on Koger, see ibid., 125.

(69) Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 150-53, 161-64, 188-90, 200-211; "From Coast to Coast UCAPAWA Grows: Whitfield," UCAPAWA News, December 1, 1943, p. 2; Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, March 25, 1943, Folder 5, Box 6, Series 1, Cook Papers; Case No. R-2598 (Decided on July 21, 1941), in Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board. Vol. 33: June 27 to August 7, 1941 (Washington, D.C., 1942), 674-79; Case No. R-5568 (Decided on July 13, 1943), in Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board. Vol. 51: July 1, 1943 to August 19, 1943 (Washington, D.C., 1944), 308-12; Case No. 5-R-1356 (Decided on October 13, 1943), in Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board. Vol. 52: August 20, 1943 to October 22, 1943 (Washington, D.C., 1944), 1311-23. For an overview of the CIO's attempts to unionize southern workers see Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia, 1988). UCAPAWA became the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA) in 1944 to better reflect its concentration in organizing food- and tobacco-processing workers.

(70) Fannie Cook to Owen Whitfield, November 8, 1942, Folder 4, Box 6, Series I, Cook Papers.

(71) Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, February 15, 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(72) Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, March 2, 1942, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers. Whitfield did not disclose the exact location of the compress. A letter suggests the plant was located just south of Memphis. See Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, December 3, 1942, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(73) Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, November 4, 1942, Folder 4, Box 6, Series 1, Cook Papers.

(74) During World War II the Communist Party's policy prioritized the war effort of the Soviet Union and United States above all else, which led to a decline of some of the party's protest activities. See Harvard Sitkoff, "African American Militancy in the World War II South: Another Perspective," in Neil R. McMillen, ed., Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Jackson, Miss., 1997), 82-83.

(75) Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, March 2, 1942, Folder 15, Box 24, Williams Papers.

(76) Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, January 25, 1943 (first and fourth quotations); Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, March 25, 1943 (second and third quotations), both in Folder 5, Box 6, Series 1, Cook Papers. By the spring of 1946, the organizing work at the Planters Nut and Chocolate Company in Suffolk, Virginia, paid off. Local 26 of the FTA signed an agreement that raised wages and guaranteed vacations with pay, overtime pay, sick leave, and seniority rights for its three thousand (overwhelmingly black) workers. See "Planters Nuts, Union Agree," Chicago Bee, June 23, 1946, p. 4.

(77) Owen Whitfield to Julia Katz, December 16, 1941 (first, second, third, and fourth quotations), NNC Papers, part 3, reel 7. frames 679-81 ; Owen Whitfield to Paul McNutt, Chairman of the War Manpower Commission, 1942, Folder 4, Box 6. Series 1, Cook Papers (fifth quotation). Harvard Sitkoff's study of black protest during World War II concludes that the majority of the two thousand African Americans sent to prison for not complying with the Selective Service Act were members of the Ethiopian Pacific Movement, the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, and the Nation of Islam. See Sitkoff, "African American Militancy in the World War II South," 73.

(78) Owen Whitfield to FSA officials Baldwin, Beck, and Stewart, October 11, 1942, Folder 4, Box 6: Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, November 4, 1942, Folder 4, Box 6; Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook. February 2, 1944 (first, second, and third quotations), Folder 6, Box 6, all in Series 1, Cook Papers; Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, October 1. 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers (fourth and fifth quotations). When William M. Fischer, a white man, tried to start a new UCAPAWA local in the camp, it caused controversy because most of the residents already belonged to other locals. Walter Johnson, the original black president of Cropperville, saw this move by Fischer as an attempt to take control. Fischer tried to unseat Johnson as president but failed three times. Labeled "backsliders," the members of Fischer's group created tension by organizing their own meetings. Others accused them of hoarding food and clothing. See Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 68-71.

(79) "Program from Institute of Applied Religion for One Hundred Religious and Labor Leaders Among Rural and Shop Workers of the South," April 30 to May 3, 1942, Christ Church Cathedral, St. Louis, Folder 20, Box 2, Williams Papers; Claude Williams, Religion: Barrier or Bridge to a People's World? A Handbook jot Progressive Leaders (Birmingham, 1947) [a pamphlet reprinting a speech of December 29, 1945], 49 (third and fourth quotations), 50 (first and second quotations); Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, March 4, 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers (fifth, sixth, and seventh quotations). STFU and UCAPAWA had argued over dues payments for sharecroppers in the late 1930s. STFU had charged a nominal fee of ten cents per year; UCAPAWA wanted to raise the membership tee for its members to sixty cents per month. Dunbar, Against the Grain, 175.

(80) Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, February 15, 1944 (first and second quotations); Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, June 11, 1944 (seventh quotation), both in Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers; Owen Whitfield, "Foreword," 1944, Folder 6, Box 6, Series 1, Cook Papers (third, fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations).

(81) Naison, "Claude and Joyce Williams," 50. For more on Detroit during the war, see Beth Bates, "'Double V for Victory' Mobilizes Black Detroit, 1941-1946," in Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York, 2003), 17-39; and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), 17-88.

(82) "Rev. Whitfield Will Keynote Conference," Detroit Free Press, July 22, 1944; Claude Williams to Owen Whitfield, July 14, 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers (first quotation); "Press Release," July 15, 1944, NNC Papers, part 3, reel 9, frames 824-28 (second quotation in frame 825).

(83) Owen Whitfield, "Annual Report of PIAR in Southeast Missouri," November 11, 1945, Folder 25, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(84) For one of many examples of his monthly payment see Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, March 4, 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(85) Owen Whitfield, "Annual Report of PIAR in Southeast Missouri," November 11, 1945, Folder 25, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(86) Ibid.

(87) Owen Whitfield, "Annual Report of PIAR in Southeast Missouri," November 11, 1945, Folder 25; Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, June 11, 1944, Folder 24 (first quotation), both in Box 15, Williams Papers; and Williams, Religion: Barrier or Bridge to a People's World? 5 (second quotation), 44 (third and fourth quotations).

(88) Harry Koger moved to Little Rock to head PIAR there, and Whitfield attended a conference there in February 1945. See Claude Williams to Owen Whitfield, January 4, 1945; Harry Koger to Owen Whitfield, January 25, 1945; Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, January 28, 1945; Zella Whitfield to Claude Williams, February 19, 1945, all in Folder 25, Box 15, Williams Papers. In June 1945 Williams reported to Owen and Zella Whitfield that he had founded a Chicago branch of PIAR, and Whitfield attended a "revival" there in August. See Claude Williams to Zella and Owen Whitfield, June 7, 1945: Claude Williams to Owen Whitfield, August 11, 1945; Owen Whitfield to "Old Rebel" [Claude Williams], August 13, 1945; and Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, September 25, 1945, all in Folder 25, Box 15, Williams Papers. From December 29, 1945, to January 2, 1946, Claude Williams hosted a Youth Congress of Applied Religion in New York. Whitfield missed this conference because he traveled to San Francisco to attend the FTA conference in early January. See Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, December 16, 1945; Mrs. Calla E. Tennant to Owen Whitfield, December 17, 1945; and Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, January 4, 1946, all in Folder 25, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(89) Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, July 11, 1945, Folder 25, Box 15, Williams Papers.

(90) Nathan Oser to Revels Cayton, Executive Secretary, National Negro Congress, September 3, 1946, NNC Papers, part 2, reel 32, frames 905 7.

(91) Ibid. Twenty witnesses testified that Mr. Howard's conduct in no way justified shooting him. The grand jury deemed Niggemann's action a justifiable homicide nonetheless. See R. C. Fisher, "St. Louis Cop Shooting Case to U.S. Attorney General," Chicago Bee, November 10, 1946, p. 5.

(92) Edward E. Strong to Nathan Oser, September 10, 1946, reel 32, frames 897-98; Revels Cayton to Whom It May Concern, September 18, 1946, reel 32, frame 887; Owen Whitfield to Revels Cayton, October 12, 1946, reel 32, frame 880; Edward Strong to Owen Whitfield, October 21, 1946, reel 29, frame 678; "To All Negro Citizens in the Eleventh Legislative District," reel 32, frame 863 (quotation); "Elect A Negro To The State Legislature," reel 32, frame 864; Owen Whitfield and Thomas Gates, "Elect William Massingale to the State Legislature," reel 32, frames 862-64, all in NNC Papers, part 2; "William A. Massingale," in Esther Downs Bishop, ed., Official Manual State Of Missouri: For Years Nineteen Forty-Seven, Nineteen Forty-Eight (Jefferson City, 1948), 139.

(93) Nathan Oser to Edward Strong, October 14, 1946, Folder 11, Edward E. Strong Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.); "Executive Board Meeting," October 27, 1946, Parkway Community House, Chicago, Folder 4, Box 1, Matt N. and Evelyn Graves Crawford Papers (Special Collections and Archives Division, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia); "THE HOWARD CASE IS NOT CLOSED!" mass meeting advertisement for November 7, 1946, at the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, NNC Papers, part 2, reel 32, frame 874 (quotation). The NNC tried to appeal the justifiable homicide verdict to the attorney general. See Pauline H. Murphy to Edward Strong, November 21, 1946, frame 867; Pauline H. Murphy to Thelma Dale, December 5, 1946, frame 846; Pauline Murphy to Edward Strong, December 16, 1946, frame 930, all in NNC Papers, part 2, reel 32. In the following months, the St. Louis NNC (without Whitfield) fought to open up streetcar jobs to blacks and organized the State Legislative Committee of the National Negro Conference, which resulted in Massingale introducing to the legislature a bill to create a State Fair Employment Practices Committee. See "A Petition to the House Labor Committee," frame 817; H. D. Robinson and Pauline Murphy to Revels Cayton and Edward Strong, January 16, 1947, frames 784-85; H. D. Robinson, State Chairman of the St. Louis NNC, February 5, 1947, frame 828; "CALL TO CONSULTATION ON STATE FEPC BILL," February 11, 1947, frame 818; "IF DEMOCRACY is to work in the WORLD, IT MUST WORK IN THE U.S.A. (ST. LOUIS)," mass meeting advertisement, August 13, 1947, frame 793; H. D. Robinson to Max Yergan, Edward Strong, and Revels Cayton, August 5, 1947, frame 790, all in NNC Papers, part 2, reel 32.

(94) The FTA refused to conform to Truman's new foreign policy initiatives. Its members opposed the Marshall Plan, supported Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election, and refused to sign affidavits disclosing the political affiliation of its members, a requirement of the Taft-Hartley Act. Unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor raided the FTA's membership, and in 1950 the CIO expelled the union. See Bob Korstad, "Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA-CIO)." in Marl Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (New York, 1990), 234 35. Claude Williams moved PIAR headquarters to Birmingham after the war in the hope of connecting the growing movement with the CIO's Operation Dixie. The growing anticommunist climate caused him to move to remote Fungo Hollow. Alabama, soon alter. Limited in the political work he could perform in the 1950s, he reemerged as an important strategist for black and white activists across the state during the 1960s civil rights movement. See Naison, "'Claude and Joyce Williams," 50; and Mark D. Naison, "Williams, Claude (1893-1977)," in Buhle, Buhle, and Georgakas, eds., Encylopedia of the American Left, 825-26. The NNC was abandoned by the CIO in late 1946 and placed on the attorney general's list of "Subversive Organizations" the fnllowing year. In late 1947 the NNC merged with a new civil rights organization, the Civil Rights Congress. See Lawrence S. Wittner, "The National Negro Congress: A Reassessment," American Quarterly, 22 (Winter 1970), 883-901; and Erik Gellman, "Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress, 1936-1947" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, forthcoming 2006).

(95) Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, March 2, 1947, Folder 8 (second and third quotations), and March 17, 1947, Folder 8 (first quotation), and Fannie Cook to Owen Whitfield, January 29, 1949, Folder 9, all in Box 6, Series 1, Cook Papers; "Rev. Owen Whitfield, Led Sharecroppers' '39 Protest," New York Times, August 13, 1965, p. 26; Cadle, "'Cropperville,'" 120-23.

(96) This work builds upon the cogent scholarship of others who have focused on organic intellectuals and working-class African American resistance. See George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia, 1988); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': The Politics and Pleasures of Community," in Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 35-53; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; Honey, Southern Labor; and Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill, 1999).

(97) Owen Whitfield to Fannie Cook, November 4, 1942, Folder 4, Box 6 (first quotation) and Owen Whitfield, "Foreword," 1944, Folder 6, Box 6, both in Series 1, Cook Papers; Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, October 1, 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers (second quotation).

(98) Owen Whitfield to Julia Katz, December 16, 1941, NNC Papers, part 3, reel 7, frames 679-81 (first quotation); Owen Whitfield to Claude Williams, April 25, 1944, Folder 24, Box 15, Williams Papers (second quotation).

(99) Williams, Religion: Barrier or Bridge to a People's World? 53.

(100) On the rural black church during the 1960s black freedom struggle, see C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, N.C., 1990), 97. "Confounding the sociological prophecies of the decline of religion or black religion as the opiate of the masses," the authors write, "at the height of the conflict [in the 1960s] many black rural and urban folk stood up in their churches to be counted." As further evidence, the authors cite the bombing or burning of ninety-three rural churches for civil rights activities between 1962 and 1965.

(101) Whitfield provides powerful testimony against the conclusions of scholars such as Harvard Sitkoff who overlook rural blacks' will to fight for their place on the land and all it entailed in terms of social life, kinship ties, and attachment to the past. Sitkoff concludes that blacks in the rural South were immobilized by centuries of oppression and "in the 1930s remained enslaved by disease and disfranchisement, by a dearth of opportunity for employment and education, by social disorganization and dormancy, by isolation and intimidation." Their "[f]ear, weakness, and resignation," he continues, "bred a crippling paralysis of will to struggle." As Whitfield's life shows, rural blacks possessed above all else a will to struggle, because and in spite of the reasons Sitkoff cites for its absence. Sitkoff, "The Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners," in James C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson, Miss., 1984), 120. In recent works such as de Jong, Different Day, Woodruff, American Congo, and Fannin, Labor's Promised Land, scholars have started to explore the social and political movements of rural blacks in the first half of the twentieth century.

MR. GELLMAN and MR. ROLL are Ph.D. candidates in the Department of History at Northwestern University.