Owen Whitfield

Last updated

Owen Whitfield (October 14, 1891 - August 1965) [1] was a preacher and leader of the 1939 Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration, where both black and white homeless sharecropping families camped out on the side of the road as a means of getting the government's attention on the vast poverty and injustice of tenants. [2] He was also a union organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union which was “dedicated to the complete abolition of tenantry and wage slavery in all its forms”. [3] Through his use of applied religion, Whitfield mobilized his audiences and exhorted them to stop thinking of the afterlife and instead focus on living and practicing their faith. He is noted for preaching to his audiences: “take your eyes out of the sky because someone is stealing your bread”. [4]

Contents

Personal life

Owen Whitfield was born in 1892 in Jonestown, Mississippi to a sharecropping family. [5] His parents were sharecroppers, so they moved often in order to find independence, better wages, and security. After the family purchased some land, his mother died and Whitfield moved in with his uncle in 1909. [6] His uncle, Chuck Whitfield, who was also a sharecropper, funded Owen's education at Okolona Industrial School. This school was a black institute dedicated to teaching and improving the lives of African Americans. Unlike the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which specialized in agricultural and manual labor education, Okolona also taught grammar, nursing, chemistry, music, and English literature. [7] After two years at the school, he met and married Zella Glass, who was then a thirteen-year-old cotton picker and daughter of a sharecropper. By 1941, Owen and his wife bore a total of fifteen children. [8] He gained publicity for his participation in the 1939 Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration. He died in 1965. [9]

Spiritual life

Owen Whitfield began preaching in 1924 in the Bootheel but his spirituality was affected by circumstances throughout his childhood. As a child, his mother, who was a devout Christian, would associate the discriminations of the white populations with the devil and would instill in him Christian values. [10] In addition, the principles of the Okolona Industrial School, which emphasized the importance of civic service, also influenced his desire to preach. [11] On November 5, 1936, after he had established himself as a preacher, Whitfield invited Claude Williams to preach at his church. Williams encouraged the congregation to unite and confront southern injustices to better their positions in society. [12] Whitfield was so enthused about William's message that soon after he joined the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

Involvement with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union

Whitfield joined the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1937 after a spiritual encounter in the summer of 1936. During this summer day, his daughter ran to him and told him that the family had run out of food. Whitfield then fell to his knees in anger and prayed. Whitfield noted that the voice of the Lord came to him and explained that he was indeed blessed but that it was his fault for letting people, the planters, take away his bounty. [13]

After he joined the union, Whitfield used his status as a preacher to reach his congregations. He used the pulpit to preach in favor of the STFU and also used the church as a safe house, for union activities, away from planters. [14] His position as preacher gave him many connections and a respectable status in his community. He made ties with both blacks and whites, including Thad Snow who was a “radical” planter who often advocated for the rights of the tenants in the Bootheel. [15] Under Snow's guidance and help, Whitfield and his family were able to obtain lodging at the La Forge Project, which was aimed at helping homeless tenants. In addition, in 1937, Whitfield was elected vice president of the STFU. [16]

The 1939 Sharecroppers Roadside Demonstration

Throughout his involvement in the STFU, Whitfield opposed strikes and urged the sharecroppers to use the power of the government to obtain victories. This belief was used as a backdrop for the 1939 Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration.

As part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agricultural program, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was passed. This law was supposed to bring relief to farmers by increasing cotton prices. Although planting acreages were cut, the government issued checks to the farmers as compensation. [17] The sharecroppers were not happy about this legislation however. They viewed it as an evil since the planters would keep the entire checks for themselves by explaining to their tenants that they were switching from employing sharecroppers to day laborers. [3] As a result, the planters would evict the sharecroppers.

In January 1939, mass evictions of sharecroppers were to occur in the Bootheel. Because Whitfield preferred bringing change through the government, he organized the mass demonstration of evicted sharecroppers along the 60 and 61 U.S Highways in the Bootheel. But Whitfield did not plan to just leave the sharecroppers on the road; he wanted the event to be highly publicized. He invited reporters to the mass meetings before and during the demonstration. [18] During the demonstration, Whitfield was not present because of death threats addressed to him. Instead, he was in the north advocating help from politicians. In February 1939, Whitfield met with President Roosevelt who agreed to help the sharecroppers. Previous to this, however, the state forced the demonstrators to leave the roadsides because they were hurting the public health. [19] After some time, Whitfield was able to compromise the construction of Delmo Security Homes where more than six hundred sharecropping families were housed. [20] By this time, Owen Whitfield, the preacher and union organizer had gained nationwide recognition as the man who “woke up the cotton slaves” in the Bootheel, Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century. [21]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agricultural Adjustment Act</span> United States federal law of the New Deal era

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land. The money for these subsidies was generated through an exclusive tax on companies that processed farm products. The Act created a new agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, also called "AAA" (1933–1942), an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to oversee the distribution of the subsidies. The Agriculture Marketing Act, which established the Federal Farm Board in 1929, was seen as an important precursor to this act. The AAA, along with other New Deal programs, represented the federal government's first substantial effort to address economic welfare in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Missouri</span>

The history of Missouri begins with settlement of the region by indigenous people during the Paleo-Indian period beginning in about 12,000 BC. Subsequent periods of native life emerged until the 17th century. New France set up small settlements, and in 1803, Napoleonic France sold the area to the U.S. as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Statehood for Missouri came following the Missouri Compromise in 1820 that allowed slavery. Settlement was rapid after 1820, aided by a network of rivers navigable by steamboats, centered in the City of St. Louis. It attracted European immigrants, especially Germans; the business community had a large Yankee element as well. The Civil War saw numerous small battles and control by the Union. After the war, its economy diversified, and railroads centered in Kansas City, opened up new farmlands in the west.

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South was the American Methodist denomination resulting from the 19th-century split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). Disagreement on this issue had been increasing in strength for decades between churches of the Northern and Southern United States; in 1845 it resulted in a schism at the General Conference of the MEC held in Louisville, Kentucky.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tenant farmer</span> Farmer whose land is owned by a landlord

A tenant farmer is a person who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management. Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination. The rights the tenant has over the land, the form, and measures of payment vary across systems. In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim ; in others, the landowner and tenant sign a contract for a fixed number of years. In most developed countries today, at least some restrictions are placed on the rights of landlords to evict tenants under normal circumstances.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elijah Parish Lovejoy</span> American minister, journalist, and abolitionist (1802–1837)

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was an American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor, and abolitionist. After his murder by a mob, he became a martyr to the abolitionist cause opposing slavery in the United States. He was also hailed as a defender of free speech and freedom of the press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peon</span> Social category

Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mississippi Delta</span> Northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi

The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth", because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharecropping</span> Use of land by a tenant in return for a share of the crops produced

Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is not to be conflated with tenant farming, providing the tenant a higher economic and social status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Missouri Bootheel</span> Place

The Missouri Bootheel is a salient (protrusion) located in the southeasternmost part of the U.S. state of Missouri, extending south of 36°30′ north latitude, so called because its shape in relation to the rest of the state resembles the heel of a boot. Strictly speaking, it is composed of some or all of the counties of Dunklin, New Madrid, and Pemiscot. However, the term is locally used to refer to the entire southeastern lowlands of Missouri located within the Mississippi Embayment, which includes parts of Butler, Mississippi, Ripley, Scott, Stoddard and extreme southern portions of Cape Girardeau and Bollinger counties. The largest city in the region is Kennett.

Howard Kester (1904–1977) was an American preacher, organizer, and activist based in the South. He is noted for his work organizing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) beginning in 1934. His work was inspired by a radical version of Christianity called the Social Gospel, influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr among others, as well as a Marxist critique of the Southern economy. A white Southerner, he believed that it was important to end racial strife by uniting poor black and whites around a common cause.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern Tenant Farmers Union</span> Labor union organization

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), later known as the National Farm Labor Union, the National Agricultural Workers Union, and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union, was founded as a civil farmer's union to organize tenant farmers in the Southern United States. Many such tenant farmer sharecroppers were Black descendants of former slaves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LeRoy Percy</span> American politician (1860–1929)

LeRoy Percy was an American attorney, planter, and Democratic politician who served as a United States Senator from the state of Mississippi from 1910 to 1913.

<i>The Store</i> (novel) 1932 novel by Thomas Sigismund Stribling

The Store is a 1932 novel by Thomas Sigismund Stribling. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1933. It is the second book of the Vaiden trilogy, comprising The Forge, The Store, and Unfinished Cathedral. All three books in the trilogy have been kept in print since the mid-1980s by the University of Alabama Press.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arkansas Delta</span> Natural region of Arkansas

The Arkansas Delta is one of the six natural regions of the state of Arkansas. Willard B. Gatewood Jr., author of The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox, says that rich cotton lands of the Arkansas Delta make that area "The Deepest of the Deep South."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Handcox</span> American poet

John L. Handcox (1904–1992) was a Great Depression-era tenant farmer and union advocate from Arkansas renowned for his politically charged songs and poetry. Handcox is noted for playing a "vital role in bettering the lives of sharecroppers and energizing labor union organizers and members." Despite his brief career, many of his songs were so popular that they became standard folk songs themselves, and continue to be sung today.

Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979) was a Presbyterian minister active for more than 50 years in civil rights, race relations, and labor advocacy. He worked with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded the People's Institute for Applied Religion, and served as the national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. He was also the director of Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, from 1937–1939.

Arthur Witman (1902–1991) was a news photographer with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a distinguished spokesperson for his profession.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black Belt in the American South</span> Black Belt in the American South

The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H. L. Mitchell</span> American agricultural workers union leader

Harry Leland Mitchell was an American union leader. He was a cofounder and leader of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in 1934, and led its successor unions, for most of the next twenty-six years. He had been a sharecropper himself, and a socialist like his fellow instigator of the STFU, Clay East. They led an initially small racially mixed union of poor people within three years to a membership of some 30,000 tenant farmers and sharecroppers. As the STFU evolved through association with larger, more powerful unions, it changed its name, and Mitchell his official role. He was President of the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU), then of the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU), before retiring in 1960. In 1979, he published a memoir concerned almost entirely with his organizing activities.

The National Federation of Colored Farmers (NFCF) was a cooperative foundation founded in 1922 by a group of African-American entrepreneurs and attorneys. Their purpose was to advance efforts to build the capacity of America’s Black farmers, by forming local chapters of buying and selling distribution cooperatives. Membership was African American farmers in the south and Midwest. This federation existed until 1949, and was registered in Illinois.

References

  1. "Owen Whitfield" . Retrieved December 26, 2020.
  2. Gellman, Erik S.; Jarod H. Roll (May 2006). "Owen Whitfield and the Gospel of the Working Class in New Deal America, 1936-1946". The Journal of Southern History. 72 (2): 319.
  3. 1 2 Cantor, Louis (1969). A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 . Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. p.  19. ISBN   9780822302155.
  4. Cantor, Louis (1969). A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 . Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. pp.  32. ISBN   9780822302155.
  5. Craig, Robert H. (1992). Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States. Temple University Press. ISBN   9781566393355.
  6. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 14.
  7. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 15.
  8. Belfrage, Cedric (November 1948). "Cotton-Patch Moses". Harper's Magazine. 197 (1182): 102.
  9. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 166.
  10. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 11.
  11. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 34.
  12. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 71.
  13. Cantor, Louis (1969). A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 . Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. p.  31. ISBN   9780822302155.
  14. Gellman, Erik S.; Jarod H. Roll (May 2006). "Owen Whitfield and the Gospel of the Working Class in New Deal America, 1936-1946". The Journal of Southern History. 72 (2): 310.
  15. Cantor, Louis (1969). A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 . Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. p.  30. ISBN   9780822302155.
  16. Cantor, Louis (1969). A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 . Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. p.  34. ISBN   9780822302155.
  17. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 37.
  18. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 95.
  19. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 98.
  20. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 103.
  21. Gellman, Erik S.; Roll, Jarod (2011). The Gospel of the Working Class. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 99.