Way ahead of its time

TYRONZA — It’s an unlikely museum in a state where only 4 percent of workers belong to a labor union, and “socialism” is pretty much a dirty word.

But the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum is heading toward its fifth anniversary this fall in Tyronza under the aegis of Arkansas State University. Its exhibits tell the implausible story of a racially integrated union founded by two ardent socialists in this Poinsett County town during the depths of the Great Depression.

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union flew in the face of ubiquitous Jim Crow segregation in the Arkansas Delta and across the South by welcoming white and black members on equal footing.And, in an America of the 1930s that was mostly a man’s world, women played a substantial leadership role.

The union’s successes were limited, and it faded away after barely a decade. But it left a legacy of moral and physical courage vividly conveyed at the eye-opening museum.

“My sense is that the museum impacts visitors in two very different ways,” says Ruth Hawkins,director of Arkansas Heritage Sites, which oversees the Tyronza facility and two other historical properties (Lakeport Plantation in Lake Village and the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Piggott).

“There are those who had no idea that such agricultural struggles existed and are surprised as well to learn that a desegregated union could have existed in the 1930s in eastern Arkansas,” says Hawkins. “Many of these visitors leave with a profound sense of sadness at the plight of farm workers during the Great Depression, but I think it also causes them to think about the fact that extreme poverty still exists today.

“Others who come into the museum immediately identify with the photos of what farming was like before mechanization. They can recall similar experiences in picking and hauling cotton, going to the company store, or looking forward to when the crops were laid by. It triggers great memories of a simpler life and becomes a wonderful way that they can share early experiences with children or grandchildren who are with them.”

Before the ASU Heritage Studies Program and local volunteers created the museum, with funding via the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the union was something of a forgotten chapter in Tyronza’s history.

“I’d lived here 30-odd years and had never heard of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union,” says Linda Hinton, the facility’s on-site assistant director. “It was one of those things that nobody around town talked about.”

One reason for that lack of awareness was the union’s relatively short tenure in Tyronza.Violent harassment by night riding landowners and their minions forced the union’s headquarters to be moved to Memphis a year or so after it was established in July 1934 by 11 white and seven black sharecroppers meeting at a schoolhouse near Tyronza.

The museum sits on what was facetiously labeled “Red Square” when H.L. Mitchell and Clay East led the fledgling union. In an odd juxtaposition, the two socialists were businessmen as well as leftist activists. Mitchell operated a dry cleaning shop, while East ran an adjoining service station. Those two restored structures along with the former Bank of Tyronza house the museum.

The voices of Mitchell and East can be heard at several kiosks in the museum from interviews recorded in the 1980s. In one, East talks about the integration that was several decades ahead of its time.

“We didn’t have any troubles about the race situation for the simple reason I told them they were all working for the same thing,” he is heard saying. “You’re eatin’ the same kind of food, everything is the same. You can’t have two unions. If you do, one of them will be fightin’ the other one. It has to be integrated.”

“He was right,” says Hinton as she guides a visitor through the mainly chronological exhibits. “If you’ve got this white sharecropper family sitting on the side of the road evicted, and you’ve got this evicted black family sitting beside them, they’re all equal, eating turnip greens and fatback.They realized they were all being mistreated the same. There was no difference.”

OF BROADER INTEREST

While the union’s short history forms the core of the displays, the museum broadens its appeal with an array of more general exhibits documenting the changes in the Arkansas Delta’s economic and cultural landscape going back to the decades before statehood.

“We particularly focus on the [New Madrid] earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, because they changed our region so much,” Hinton says. “We went from a lush forest to swampland.Almost all of Poinsett County was underwater.”

A section titled “The Slave Era” covers the antebellum period when cotton became the Delta’s principal cash crop.

“The reason it’s here is to point out that the end of slavery was the beginning of sharecropping,” says Hinton. “There was still a need for labor. And the former slaves did not want to work for free. They wanted their own land. That’s when the concept of sharecropping came about. The landowner would let them work so many acres of land, then share the profits.”

The museum’s chronology proceeds to the major floods of 1913, 1927 and 1937 that caused so much havoc but also enriched the Delta soil.

Another display touches on the 1919 racial violence in Elaine, in which five whites and perhaps several hundred blacks died - “either the Elaine Riots or the Elaine Massacre, depending on which side you were on,” Hinton says. “The reason Elaine is included is to help visitors understand why, when the union was formed in 1934, some blacks were a little hesitant to join, because of what had happened 15 years earlier.”

Photographs and other exhibits make clear that the life of tenant farmers was an arduous, hard-scrabble struggle even in normal economic times. By the time President Franklin D.Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933, the Great Depression had straitened landowners as well.

When Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act later that year, it inadvertently set the stage for the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum. The act aimed to raise cotton prices by cutting production, so landowners were paid either not to plant or to plow under existing crops. The federal subsidies were supposed to be shared with their sharecroppers, but many planters kept all the money and evicted tenants whose labor was no longer needed.

Among the beleaguered farmers were the 18 who established the union under the guidance of Mitchell and East. In the face of intimidation by the planters, the union complained to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which sent lawyer Mary Connor Myers to investigate.

“She helped break up Al Capone and his gang,” says East in one of the taped interviews. “And she said, ‘Al Capone and them boys were pantywaists beside them damned folks [the night riding landowners] from Crittenden County.’ And when she got back to make that report, they wouldn’t print it. Too hot to print.”

“And it’s still a missing report,” Hinton says. “Nobody’s ever found it.”

Photographs with several displays make evident the leadership roles that women played in the union. In a photo of the Cotton Plant local’s officers, all are women. “One of them, Myrtle Lawrence, became one of the best organizers the STFU had,” says Hawkins.

FEATURED IN A NEWSREEL

The union received verbal support from such noted figures as Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1938, it claimed a membership of 35,000 spread across a number of states. Bringing it to wider national attention was a segment in The March of Time, the popular newsreel series shown in movie theaters. An eight-minute video version can be watched at the museum.

“It was made in 1936 during a cotton-pickers’ strike,” says Hinton. “It ran in all the movie theaters. It really let the nation know what was going on around here. It was actually filmed outside Forrest City. There’s some dramatization, including staged floggings [of union members by planter vigilantes]. But everything it shows pretty much happened.”

Music accents the union’s story from a jukebox that plays the songs of John Handcox and other labor troubadours. An organizer who became the union’s songwriter and poet, Handcox wrote the memorable “There Is Mean Things Happening in This Land,” with such Delta-suited lines as “Too much cotton in our sacks, So we have none on our backs.”

“The Union Legacy,” the museum’s final exhibit area, reports on the decline and eventual demise of the union following a couple of name changes.

“Several things happened during World War II,” Hinton says. “A lot of farmers and sharecroppers went up north to work in the war factories. Another thing that came along was mechanization. With the cotton-picking machines, a lot less human labor was needed.”

Now, she says, the museum has “our Kodak corner, where lots of people who’ve never seen cotton being grown or harvested get their picture made [in front of a hulking bale of cotton]. Even schoolchildren from around here who come to the museum, they’re not out in the field like the pickers used to be. And they’re lucky they’re not out there.”

Director Hawkins says the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum expects to benefit if efforts succeed to open a Johnny Cash visitor center and restore his boyhood home in nearby Dyess. An Aug. 4 fundraising concert for that project will feature Cash family members on ASU’s Jonesboro campus.

“We have a loop already that some tour buses take,” she says. “They’ll come through Tyronza to visit us and then go around to Dyess, although there’s not a lot to see there right now.”

Hawkins also reports that her museum plans some changes, aiming to increase its visitor count from the present 3,500 a year.

“The additions would include excerpts from oral-history interviews, as well as farm equipment from the 1930s,” she says. “And we hope to locate an actual sharecropper shack and move it to the site, so that visitors can get a better feel for what daily living conditions were like.”The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, 117 Main St., Tyronza, is open 9 a.m.-3 p.m.

Monday-Friday and noon-3 p.m. Saturday. An admission donation of $5 ($3 for senior citizens and groups with reservations) is requested. For information, call (870) 487-2909 or visit stfm.astate.edu.