by John Egerton
During his tenure as the NAACP’s chief executive in the 1930s, Walter White sought to carve out a niche for himself that neither the Du Bois/Crisis faction nor the legal initiatives of Houston, Marshall, and Hastie would overshadow. White liked the limelight, and he was not only an outgoing individual but a fearless social activist as well. His efforts as a lobbyist in the halls of Congress and as an investigator of lynchings in the rural South had won him high marks for skill and courage, but in neither arena was his bold performance rewarded with spectacular results. Like James Weldon Johnson before him, he tried repeatedly to prod the Congress into action on such issues as lynching, poll taxes, Negro voting rights, peonage, tenant farming, and labor unions. Also like Johnson, he was not easily discouraged by failure.
To help him in his undercover investigations of lynch-mob activities, Walter White enlisted the help of Howard Kester, the Tennessee-based white activist whose interracial experience had brought him to the attention of the NAACP. Kester had several close scrapes as an investigator, most notably in Marianna, Florida, where his life was threatened in October 1934 as he documented (for later publication by the NAACP) the gruesome details of a frenzied lynch mobs torture and dismemberment of a black field hand thought to have been the lover and murderer of a young white woman.
Taking into account the virulence of Southern racism in those years and the dangers that faced anyone, black or white, who was bold enough to question it, the wonder is that men and women like Buck and Alice Kester could survive at all in such an oppressive climate. Those who did take exception, no matter how mild or vigorous, to the temper of the times were automatically branded as radicals—unwanted troublemakers at best, and at worst, aliens and Communists and traitorous enemies of the people. Most amazing of these native Southern pariahs were the ones who stayed in the region and worked independently, without the protection of such established forces as the university and the church. Sometimes they banded together in little organizations of their own creation. Kester’s Fellowship of Southern Churchmen was one such group; two others of note were the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.
The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen was never anything more than a loose confederation of like-minded believers in a general philosophy of Christian brotherhood and populist democracy. All of its members had primary duties elsewhere, most of them in church or university jobs. With the support and encouragement of Reinhold Niebuhr, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and other Christian Socialist groups and individuals, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen brought together a small group of men and women, white and black, who were committed to social reform. For ten years after it was organized in 1934, Buck Kester was its leader, but only in the last three of those years was that a full-time job. Prior to 1934—the year he turned thirty—Kester had attracted considerable notoriety in and out of the South for his Socialist politics, his clashes with institutional forces as disparate as Princeton and Vanderbilt universities and the Communist Party, his work on behalf of striking Tennessee coal miners, and his extensive interracial activities. As it turned out, the soft-spoken Virginian was just getting started.
In the last half of the 1930s, Kester found time to lead the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, continue his lynching investigations for the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, be ordained as a Congregational Church minister, and write a book (Revolt Among the Sharecroppers). Still another of his significant contributions during that period was his involvement with H. L. Mitchell and others in a pathfinding labor organizing venture, a biracial alliance of field hands called the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.
For all their similarities as young white men working for the social and economic betterment of poor people in their native South, Howard Kester and Harry Leland Mitchell had come to their activism by two very different routes. Kester was a middle-class, college-educated Virginia town boy with Presbyterian and Quaker roots and an evangelical pacifistic commitment to Christian ethics; Mitchell was a country boy born in a two-room tenant shack next to a cotton field and raised among sharecroppers and timber cutters by hardworking parents who moved from job to job in the vast bottomland farming region of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
H. L.’s people were loyal Confederates who found their faithfulness rewarded with little more than the specious promise that even in the most abject poverty they were better than “the niggers.” His father was a self-trained barber who sharecropped cotton on the side and still found time to preach and proselytize as a Baptist evangelist. The boy was a field hand himself by the age of eight, and he grew to young manhood knowing what it was like to work sixteen-hour summer days for his family’s paltry crop, or for fifty cents’ worth of credit at the plantation commissary.
In December 1917, when he was eleven years old, young Mitchell rode an excursion train from his home village of Halls to nearby Dyersburg in west Tennessee to witness a lynching. With hundreds of other white people drawn to the site by advance billing of the event, he looked on as a black grocery-store delivery boy named Scott Lignon was chained to an iron stake in the courthouse yard. A white woman to whom he had delivered groceries had accused Lignon of making sexually suggestive remarks to her, and on her word alone, the young man was dealt a swift and fatal penalty. Scraps of wood were piled around him, soaked with kerosene, and set afire. H. L. Mitchell saw the flames, caught the nauseating odor of burning flesh, heard the victim’s screams of suffering and the cheers of the morbidly excited throng. Sickened and terrified, he bolted out of their midst and fled. The atrocity was branded in his memory for life.
A high school graduate by the skin of his teeth, Mitchell married young and went off in rebellious search for a more fulfilling lot than fate had given his parents. Rejecting their Baptist piety, he abandoned the Christian faith altogether, and he also gave up on Democratic Party politics to become a follower of Norman Thomas and the Socialists. But the pull of his family and the South was too great for him to overcome, and for nearly seven years he ran a dry-cleaning business in the back of his father’s barbershop in the east Arkansas cotton field village of Tyronza.
His closest friend in Tyronza was Clay East, a hardworking gas-station operator who liked to talk politics. After the stock market crashed in 1929 and the depression set in, East came around to Mitchell’s view that socialism was America’s best hope for salvation. Mitchell went to a Socialist conference in Washington in 1933—meeting Howard Kester of Nashville while there—and the following February he persuaded Norman Thomas to come and see how little the New Deal’s vaunted agricultural recovery programs were doing to help the burdened sharecroppers and tenant farmers of Arkansas. The appearance of the fifty-year-old Socialist warhorse in the high school auditorium in Tyronza effectively lifted Mitchell and East to the forefront of Arkansas socialism. A few months later, in July 1934, a delegation of eleven white and seven black farmworkers evicted from a nearby plantation for protesting low pay and poor working conditions called on the two Tyronza mavericks for help. Their coming together marked the beginning of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.
Mitchell and East recruited several Socialists from within two hundred miles or so of the Arkansas delta to aid in the movement. Kester came from Nashville, and two of his Alva Taylor–trained classmates at Vanderbilt, Ward Rodgers and Claude Williams, reported in from west Arkansas; brothers John and Mack Rust (soon to perfect their mechanical cotton picker) answered from across the river in Mississippi, and a self-styled Arkansas hillbilly named J. R. Butler, toughened by years of labor in the oil fields, sawmills, and cotton patches, brought his experience to the fray. Within the ranks of the aggrieved tenant farmers themselves, strong leadership came from whites like Alvin Nunnally and Bill Stultz, and from Isaac Shaw, E. B. McKinney, and other blacks.
In just four years the Tyronza-born STFU would have more than thirty thousand members in seven states. They boldly confronted not only the planter-banker-politician power st
ructure in the Cotton Belt, but the New Deal liberals as well, demanding from the former a minimum wage (ten cents an hour or a dollar a day) and accusing the latter of rescuing landlords while the serfs languished in the depths of poverty. The national press came to investigate, and helped the union win sympathy and support from outside the South; Norman Thomas came back again, and though he was run off by a hostile white mob, he used the incident to gain more attention for the STFU. The John L. Lewis–led Committee for Industrial Organization, soon to split from the American Federation of Labor, took a special interest in the revolt of the Arkansas farm laborers; even Congress and the White House showed increasing concern for the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
But for all this newfound attention, the STFU was made to pay dearly. Powerful planters brought down the wrath of state and local authorities on the union. Some of their leaders were arrested, and virtually all were physically threatened; mass evictions put thousands of field hands out of work and out of their homes; acts of violence—beatings, house-burnings, terrorist killings—multiplied. (Clay East was attacked by a mob in one Arkansas town and run out of the state, and Buck Kester was hauled out of a mass meeting in a little country church and almost lynched before his captors relented and let him walk to safety across the Mississippi River bridge.) The federal government’s efforts to address the issues raised by the union were simply inadequate, and the support of national labor groups was even less helpful. The very idea of farmworkers organizing to bargain collectively was radical enough, but the black-white unity within the STFU was more than even most of their potential supporters could understand or accept.
When he first arrived in Arkansas, H. L. Mitchell had brought with him the conventional racial views of most Southern whites, at least to the extent that he outwardly abided by the customs and laws of segregation. But he soon came to see that the landlords used racial bias to divide laboring people and thus make easier the economic exploitation of both whites and blacks. Responding to the firm conviction of most of the sharecroppers that they must stand together or lose all, Mitchell became a committed believer himself, declaring publicly: “There are no ‘niggers’ and no ‘poor white trash’ in the Union. These two kinds of people are all lined up with the Planters. We have only Union men in our organization, and whether they are white or black makes no difference.”
An all-black underground union of sharecroppers in Alabama known to have support from the American Communist Party sought to make common cause with the STFU, but Mitchell and Kester, on the advice of Norman Thomas, avoided them. Then, in 1937, the STFU tried to affiliate with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, only to be diverted into an unwanted subordinate merger with UCAPAWA—the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America—a CIO union headed by Donald Henderson and rumored to be Communist-dominated. Over the strenuous objections of Mitchell and Kester, both of whom were openly distrustful of the tactics and objectives of the Communist Party, the members of the STFU followed the advice of Claude Williams and voted to affiliate with UCAPAWA. Two subsequent years of bitter wrangling within the new alliance brought the STFU members around to agreement with Mitchell and Kester, but it was too late to undo the damage; by the time the tenant farmers managed to sever the relationship, their union was in disarray.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union had won friends afar, but no real victories in the cotton fields at home. Times were almost as tough for the serfs of Southern agriculture in 1939 as they had been five years earlier, when H. L. Mitchell and Clay East first answered the pleas of the Tyronza field hands. But the courageous efforts of the long-suffering sharecroppers and their union were not wasted. With their help, about fifty evicted farm families moved to Mississippi and resettled on the cooperative farm established there by Sherwood Eddy and his followers; many more found homes in the Farm Security Administration’s cooperative New Deal communities—indeed, the federal government’s concern for farmworkers on the bottom of the economic heap was generated in part by the STFU’s attention-grabbing activities. And finally, because of its ability to put aside racial bias in order to confront larger economic and social issues, the STFU created a model of interracial cooperation in the mid-1930s that would still be relevant decades later.
The curious case of Claude Williams provides something of a footnote to the saga of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Williams had made his way from central Tennessee to the west Arkansas town of Paris in the mid-1930s, and was pastor of a Presbyterian church there for a few stormy years before moving to Mena to work at—and eventually head—Commonwealth, the radical labor college. (Among the “Arkansas leftists” who preceded him there, enrolling for classes in the spring of 1935, was a young student named Orval Faubus, later to become notorious as one of the South’s confrontational segregationist governors.) Williams was to be Commonwealth’s last leader; state officials, saying the school fomented anarchy, seized its property and closed it in 1940.
Always, it seemed, the unorthodox and enigmatic preacher was leaving his post under a cloud of suspicion—and always, his response to criticism was the same: “I have taken my stand with Jesus of Nazareth,” Williams replied stoically. “If I believe in him, I cannot believe in race prejudice or class antagonism and exploitation.” On the wall above his desk, he kept framed pictures of his heroes—Jesus, V. I. Lenin, and Eugene V. Debs—to watch over him in silent approbation.
No less controversial was Williams’s quixotic venture into the Arkansas farmworkers’ dispute. In one widely publicized incident, he and Willie Sue Blagden, a young white woman from a prominent Memphis family, were beaten with leather straps by a vigilante mob for protesting the killing of a black farmworker. So closely did controversy and disruption trail Williams into the union that Mitchell and Kester became convinced, after he sided with UCAPAWA, that he had been sent to Tyronza by the Communist Party to disrupt or perhaps take over the STFU. The farm union’s executive council voted in 1938 to expel him from the organization; he appealed the decision, but it was overwhelmingly confirmed by the general membership. No one seemed to trust Claude Williams, not even the South’s known Communists—but he was a man to be reckoned with, and he would be heard from again.
The Highlander Folk School, like the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and Commonwealth College, was another homegrown Southern venture of the 1930s that departed in unorthodox and controversial ways from the prevailing dogma on labor, race, class, and other fundamental issues. It got its start in the fall of 1932 when Myles Horton and Don West leased a house and two hundred acres near Monteagle, Tennessee, from Lilian Johnson, a wealthy native of Memphis with a Ph.D. from Cornell University “up East” and an abiding interest in programs of political and social cooperation.
Though still in their twenties, both men had acquired education and experience that far transcended their youth and their simple rural origins. Along the way from his west Tennessee boyhood to the Monteagle folk school venture, Horton had studied and traveled in his own state, in New York and Chicago, and in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe, and had picked up the support of such men as Abram Nightingale, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harry F. Ward, Robert E. Park, Norman Thomas, and Sherwood Eddy. West, the oldest of nine children in a Georgia mountain farm family, had stayed in the South for his education, but after completing his theology degree under Alva Taylor at Vanderbilt in 1931, he, like Horton, had gone to observe the folk school movement in Denmark.
Horton’s ambition, when he returned to the South early in 1932, was to establish an institution of education and social activism for working-class adults in the mountains of Appalachia. During a visit with Will Alexander at the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, he learned of Don West’s similar interests, and a few days later he caught up with West at W. D. Weatherford’s Blue Ridge YMCA assembly. They traveled together to Tennessee, first to see Abram Nightingale in Crossville and then, at his suggestion, to meet Lilian Johnson at her summer home near Monteagle. By the time o
f Franklin Roosevelt’s election victory that fall, Horton and West had leased the property from Johnson and started their venture—which they christened the Highlander Folk School—on a $1,300 nest egg that Niebuhr, Eddy, Thomas, and other Socialists had raised for Horton.
The two young men had lofty ideals. They wanted “to educate for a new social order,” said Horton, “and to conserve and enrich the indigenous cultural values of the mountains.” But their early achievements fell far short of their ambitions. Highlander’s interest in labor, race, and left-wing causes drew immediate and continuous fire from state and local officials, industry bosses, the press, and even some New Deal bureaucrats. The school was chronically plagued with budget problems, too, and its enrollment of resident adults seldom numbered above a dozen. Red-baiting by outside detractors and dissension within the school’s thin internal ranks also took their toll. Don West was more politically and ideologically motivated than Horton, and the two men soon were locked in a quiet struggle for authority; Horton won, and in the spring of 1933, barely six months after they had begun, West packed up and left the mountain school.
He went first to Atlanta to aid in the defense of Angelo Herndon, and then to North Carolina for a similar effort on behalf of arrested workers in the Burlington textile mill strike (UNC staff members W. T. Couch and Paul Green were among the people he enlisted in that cause). Next, West spent several years in Kentucky pursuing an eclectic succession of left-wing causes, mainly in the coalfields, before he and his family were forced by his notoriety and their personal needs to take refuge in north Georgia. He had been arrested and jailed a few times, but more often than not he had stayed on the move, hiding from the law or fleeing on his motorcycle just one jump ahead of the cops—and either way, the handsome and intense young radical gained near-legendary status as a sort of phantom revolutionary who left a trail of radical poems and sermons in his wake. Like his former classmate Claude Williams, he was widely accused of being a Communist; also like Williams, he was to continue his independent and solitary odyssey, moving in and out of sight on the margins of Southern activism for another two or three decades to come.