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No Place To Be Displaced: Katrina Response and the Deep South's Political Economy

Introduction Before Hurricane Katrina struck in late August of 2005, the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama had among the highest levels of race, class, and gender inequality...

African American Suburban Development in Atlanta

African American Suburbanization Part 2: Dr. Wiese traces how Black suburbs faced intensified segregation and isolation from the post-WWII period through the 1960s Part 3: Dr. Wiese discusses how Black neighborhoods grew...

Southern Spaces: A Partial History

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Carolina's Caribbean Origins: A Review of Hubs of Empire

Review Any historical account requires a framing device—temporal, thematic, or geographical—establishing the scope of enquiry. A Caribbean history typically invokes fairly settled geographical parameters that delimit the area to insular...

The X-Codes: A Post-Katrina Postscript

The X-Codes: A Post-Katrina Postscript Dorothy Moye, Upper Ninth Ward house with "KEN" marking from private contractor, 2009. It was a late afternoon in June 2006, and I was lost...

A City Divided

Introduction In spite of increasing animosity between workers and elites, blacks and whites, through the turn of the century, Atlanta's residential landscape remained curiously heterogeneous in terms of race and...

Bodies and Souls

Bodies and Souls: Video and Essay When the body is falling apart, it's hard to pay attention to what your soul is telling you. —Sister Manette Durand Map of Jonestown,...

Birth Right

Birth Right: Video and Essay Birth Right. A short video by Neeta Kirpalani and Emily Jackson, 2008. Midwifery is controversial in Alabama, both legislatively and in debates about women's health...

"Out Yonder on the Road": Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri

Introduction In the early morning hours of January 10, 1939, more than fifteen hundred men, women and children piled their meager belongings along US Highways 60 and 61 in the...

References
1.	"Sharecroppers Evicted, Camp Along Highways," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939; "Sharecroppers in Mass Move; Appeal to Federal Officials," Sikeston Standard, January 13, 1939; "Army of Sharecroppers Trek From Homes; Protest Missouri Landlords' Wage Plans," New York Times, January 11, 1939; Herbert Little to Aubrey Williams, January 16, 1939, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York (hereafter FDR); Colonel B.M. Casteel to Governor Lloyd Stark, January 20, 1939, Folder 1959, Papers of Governor Lloyd Stark, C0004, Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia (hereafter Stark Papers, WHMC).
2.	"Sharecroppers Evicted, Camp Along Highways," Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939.
3.	Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 3-4, 113-26 (quotes p. 126).
4.	See, for example, Stuart Kidd, "Dissonant Encounters: FSA Photographers and the Southern Underclass, 1935-1943," in Richard Godden and Martin Crawford, eds., Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 26-30 (quote p. 30); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 267-89; James Curtis, Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), viii-ix; Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 1-84, 113-41; John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 148-49; and Michael L. Carlebach, "Documentary and Propaganda: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration," The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 8 (Spring 1988): 6-13.
5.	Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Women Writers, the 'Southern Front,' and the Dialectical Imagination," Journal of Southern History 69 (February 2003): 7 (first quote); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 329 (second quote).
6.	Curiously, there are few extended historical studies of the 1939 roadside demonstration. Most of these focus on the role the affair played in the clash and ultimate split between the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations rather than the understandings and motivations of the hundreds of protestors themselves. The demonstration itself did play a role in that fracas, but the political battle that ensued between the two unions had very little to do with what brought the demonstrators to the roadsides in the first place or what their demonstration has to say about rural working-class activism in the 1930s, its aims, and its links to an older organizing tradition that predated both the STFU and the CIO. For an excellent overview, and still the only book-length treatment, of the protest, see Louis Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969). Donald Grubbs described the demonstration as "a tri-cornered circus featuring" the two unions and the planters with Owen Whitfield as the "ringmaster." See Donald Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 180-81. For an approach that looks at the demonstration from the perspective of those on the roadsides and also within a longer historical context, see Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), esp. 132-72.
7.	Eleanor Roosevelt, "My Day," January 31, 1939 (first quote), syndicated newspaper column,http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ (accessed February 2010); President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, January 19, 1939 (second quote), Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR; Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1942), 290.
8.	See John Handcox, Charleston, to H. L. Mitchell, February 8, 1937, and "Minutes of the Refugees of STFU CC," February 15, 1937, both on Reel 4, Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Papers, 1934-1970 (Glen Rock, NJ: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1971), 60 reels microfilm (hereafter STFU Papers). Slightly more than 7,000 of those displaced from the spillway were black. See Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 106.
9.	Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 232; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 44. There were six STFU locals with more than 200 total members and a large NAACP chapter with over sixty members in the area at the end of 1936. On the early 1930s organizing history in the Missouri Bootheel, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 76-102.
10.	Wright, Old South, New South, 226-32; Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 92-101.
11.	Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 4 (quote).
12.	For more on the details of this organizing drive, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 103-31. These demands had been mentioned by the STFU in some way or another since it was founded in 1934 but had given way to the union's main campaign against the injustices of the AAA. Local activists in southeast Missouri brought this more comprehensive set of objectives back to the fore following the flood crisis of 1937. In this they made a partial break from the STFU's national leadership which was based in Memphis. This break included demands by local farmers for future security on individual farms, not the collective farms proposed by the union's socialist leadership. For more information on the differences between local activism and the union's stated aims, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 76-131. For more on the STFU's national stance, see Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, 30-107. For more on the STFU's efforts to prompt FSA programs, see David Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965); and Donald Holley, Uncle Sam's Farmers: The New Deal Communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). Race relations were tense in the Missouri Bootheel where over the preceding years both white and black farmers had organized into movements defined strictly by race, including Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, the National Federation of Colored Farmers, white supremacist socialist groups, and the Ku Klux Klan. See Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 27-95.
13.	Margaret L. Bright, "Farm Wage Workers in Four Southeast Missouri Cotton-Producing Counties" (master's thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1944), 50, 61; Charles F. Hoffman and Virgil L. Bankson, "Crisis in Missouri's Boot Heel," Land Policy Review 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1940): 4-5; Daniel, Breaking the Land, 170-75. For the economic shape of rural re-development in the Bootheel, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 116, 161.
14.	Lewis Adams, East Prairie, to J. R. Butler, August 24, 1938, Reel 8, STFU Papers.
15.	"CIO Cotton Pickers Strike at Charleston," Sikeston Standard, September 27, 1938; "Cotton Strike Apparently Near the End," Charleston Enterprise-Courier, September 29, 1938; "The Sharecroppers' Demonstration," c. 1939, Folder 48, Box FC 2.3, Newspaper Clippings Collection, 1871-2001, Special Collection and Archive, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau (hereafter SEMO). For the STFU membership in Missouri, see Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 125.
16.	Owen Whitfield, "Minutes of the National Executive Council meeting of the STFU," September 16-17, 1938, quoted in Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 35.
17.	Whitfield to John T. Clark, St. Louis Urban League, August 3, 1938 (all quotes), Folder 15, Box 7, Series I, Fannie Frank Cook Papers, Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, St. Louis.
18.	Whitfield, interview by Howard Emerson, March 1963, quoted in Howard Emerson, "Sharecropper's Strike, 1939" (Senior honors thesis, Southeast Missouri State University, 1963), 41; "Investigation Concerning the Sharecropper Situation Existing in Southeast Missouri," February 1939, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Washington, 1939), 22-24 (hereafter FBI Report).
19.	Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 57-58; Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 128-31.
20.	Whitfield to H. L. Mitchell, December 1, 1938 (quotes), and Josephine Johnson, St. Louis, to H. L. Mitchell, December 21, 1938, both on Reel 9, STFU Papers; Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 54-55.
21.	Cedric Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," Harper's Magazine 197 (November 1948): 100; Bonnie Stepenoff, Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 90; FBI Report, 25.
22.	"Sharecroppers, Ordered Evicted, to Camp on Road," Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1939; Whitfield, interview by Howard Emerson, quoted in Emerson, "Sharecroppers' Strike," 41-43; Belfrage, "Cotton-Patch Moses," 94-95; Cantor,A Prologue to the Protest Movement, 60-61.
23.	See various reports in the Post-Dispatch, January 10-13, 1939; Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 115-17.
24.	"Sharecroppers Evicted, Camp Along Highways," Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1939.
25.	Kidd, "Dissonant Encounters," 26.
26.	See cases No. 1-16, 32-102, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
27.	Case No. 76 (Melvin Smith), Case No. 14 (Peter Wilderness), Case No. 101 (Walter Johnson), Case No. 72 (Ike Tripp), Case No. 41 (Daniel McClenton), Case No. 7 (Alonzo Julian), all in Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
28.	Aubrey Williams to FDR, January 19, 1939, Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
29.	Craig Winfrey to Governor Stark, January 11, 1939, Folder 1958, Stark Papers, WHMC.
30.	Case No. 51 (Dave Coffey), Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.
31.	"Stories Told by Sharecroppers Camped on Cold Highways," Daily American Republic, ca. January 1939, Folder 48, Box FC 2.3, Newspaper Clippings Collection, 1871-2001, SEMO.
32.	Alonzo J. Julien, New Madrid, "Letters Written on Backs of Survey Blanks," ca. January 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
33.	Colonel Casteel to Governor Stark, January 20, 1939, Folder 1959, Stark Papers, WHMC.
34.	Elijah Moore, Canalou, "Letters Written on Backs of Survey Blanks," ca. January 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
35.	Irene Nickerson, Portageville, "Letters Written on Backs of Survey Blanks," ca. January 1939, Reel 10, STFU Papers.
36.	Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 115-16, 126, 136-38; Kidd, "Dissonant Encounters," 26-27; "Evicted Sharecroppers????" Enterprise Courier, January 12, 1939.
37.	Roll, Spirit of Rebellion, 142-50.
38.	Harry F. Parker to Governor Stark, January 19, 1939, Folder 1938, Stark Papers, WHMC.
39.	"Move to End Trek by Sharecroppers," New York Times, January 14, 1939.
40.	Herbert Little to Aubrey Williams, January 16, 1939, and FDR to Henry Wallace, January 19, 1939, both in Folder "Tenant Farming, 1939-1944," Box 1, Official File 1650, FDR.

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