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Appendix
Crane's Ford and the Sharecroppers Union (SCU)
During the early years of the Great Depression,
the communist party sent organizers to Alabama to build a
steelworkers union in Birmingham and a sharecroppers union in the
countryside. the cotton system was verging on collapse. cotton
prices had been falling steadily since the end of the First World
War, and now, as prices hit bottom, nobody could make a profit.
Many poor farmers were uprooted; those who stayed were threatened
with the loss of their meager property and means of support.
After crops were planted in the spring of 1931,
landlords and merchants in the Crane's ford area decided to cut
off food advances to their tenants and sharecroppers while the
cotton ripened in summer. landlords also reduced day wages for
field work.
The Southern Worker, a Party newspaper
serving the southern states, printed letters from unidentified
"farmer correspondence" at Crane's ford, describing
conditions there and asking for help. The Party sent an organizer
to form a union local. Black farmers met with him and drew up a
list of demands: food advances through "settlement"
time; the right to sell their own crops and to plant small gardens
for home use; wages for picking cotton to be paid in cash in full;
a three-hour midday rest for day workers; a nine-month school year
for black children and a free school bus.
These demands went beyond measures to meet the
current crisis; if met they would have given poor farmers some
control over work conditions and improved their chances in the
world through education.
Party strategists believed that fighting for
specific demands would prepare black farmers for
"self-determination." In the Party's view, the black
majorities of black-belt counties shared economic, territorial,
and cultural identities; hence, they constituted a nation. This
"nation" would become a reality if the black-belt
counties were unified across state lines. Then, in theory, black
majorities could enfranchise themselves and vote to decide if they
would have an independent political system.
But in 1931, black farmers had to struggle
simply to remain on the land. The confrontation at Crane's Ford
was a defensive action characteristic of the Sharecroppers Union's
(SCU) early history, from 1931 to 1933. Crane's Ford farmers had
not yet planned any particular tactics to implement their demands
when, on July 15, 1931, their meeting was raided by the high
sheriff and his posse. the raid touched off several days of
sporadic violence. One farmer was killed and his house burned, and
thirty-five black were jailed on charges ranging from carrying
concealed weapons to assault and conspiracy with intent to murder.
They were never brought to trial. By September, all were released,
possibly due to lack of evidence and possibly because the cotton
needed picking.
But the SCU was effectively suppressed in
Crane's Ford. in late fall, 1932, the Party sent a second
organizer to Pottsdown, some fifteen miles to the south. Nate Shaw
describes what happened there. following the shoot-out between
farmers and sheriffs, legal prosecution and vigilante violence
curtailed union activity in the area.
Beginning in 1933, the SCU concentrated its
efforts in the black belt west of Tukabahchee County. there.
organizers saw the large plantations as "factories in the
fields." Farm laborers who neither owned nor rented the land
were brought by the wagonload and truckload into the fields to
chop and pick cotton for wages paid daily, weekly, or monthly. The
SCU claimed it had organized several thousand farm laborers, and
in 1935 the union led wage strikes with modest success across the
Alabama black belt.
Repression was severe, especially in Lowndes
County, where whites, outnumbered by blacks seven to one, defended
their supremacy with armed force. seeking protection and
additional resources, the SCU turned to New Deal agencies for
relief. After 1935, the SCU acted more and more as a liaison
between poor farmers and the New Deal.
When in 1936, the Party called for a
"united front" of communist and other
"progressive" forces, SCU organizers were already
proposing to affiliate with national unions. Tenants,
sharecroppers, and wageworkers were each to merge with an older,
established union representing its particular needs. By late 1938,
SCU tenants and sharecroppers had transferred to the Farmers
Alliance of the 1880s and 90s. Wageworkers merged into the
Agricultural Workers Union, which was chartered by the American
Federation of Labor in 1937 as the Farm Laborers and Cotton Field
Workers Union.
Affiliation signaled the SCU's shift from a
strategy of "national liberation" of the black belt to
positions squarely in the tradition of American agrarian protest.
The Farmers Union stressed credit and market problems and lobbied
for nationalizing the banks, dismantling monopolies, and reforming
the tax structure.
The shift in goals was mainly a shift on paper.
Organizers had always responded to farmers' actual needs for
self-defense and occupational improvements. Slogans about
self-determination of the black belt had little immediate appeal
to people fighting to save their livestock or to earn an extra
fifty cents a day. Changes in Party strategy, such as the call for
a "united front," did influence the SCU's direction and
affiliation, but conditions in the field generally determined
union tactics.
The SCU's struggle to secure a livelihood for
poor farmers was resolved, in part, in the general
"solutions" to the Great Depression. By the outbreak of
the Second World War, war industries had begun to absorb black and
white farmers displaced in the economic crisis; public welfare
maintained others who could not or would not leave the land. * * * *
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updated 10 December 2007 |
