James D. Ross Jr. The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas

The story of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), the Depression-era biracial labor organization defeated by planter violence, mechanization, acreage reduction, and internal strife, has been told numerous times. Beginning with influential recollections passed down by STFU cofounder H. L. Mitchell during the 1960s and continued through scholarly treatments, most notably Donald H. Grubbs’s classic organizational study Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (1971), writers have explored the group’s history largely from the viewpoint of the union’s indigenous radical leaders and its Socialist Party benefactors. In The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas, James D. Ross Jr. seeks to incorporate the long-neglected voices of the union’s rank-and-file membership through an analysis of the letters that they wrote to their leaders (located within the STFU Papers) in order to address lingering misconceptions concerning the union’s origins, the degree...

Economic history · Economics · Great Depression · Indigenous · Labour economics · Order (exchange) · Political science · Trade union · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society