The Great Depression; Interview with Nancy Neal. Part 1

. Take one marker. So if you can tell me about how the government program of the plow ups affected evictions. You ready? Okay. The government program, which, plow up program, which resulted in evictions, was a disastrous one. It was intended to be helpful. Instead, it helped the planters and didn't help the sharecroppers and tenant farmers and people who were just trying to make it. So it aggravated their situations by a whole lot.

And as a result of it, tenant farmers and sharecroppers were often evicted from their land and had nothing in the first place. So went from some predictability to very little in their lives and were often in absolutely desperate situations. So it was a very unfortunate program, probably had good intentions behind it. Can you say how... Stop. Okay. Just out of pitch here. Take two marker. Take one more. Yeah, I said take one. Just to say how the government program of plowing up would have led to evictions. It was intended that planters would cut back on the amount of land that was used for growing cotton. And it was an effort to provide some income for the planters and compensation, which was to be shared with tenant farmers.

And many of them kept it, so it wasn't available for them in terms of helping them move on or move out. And it also made it possible for a lot of planters to move them off the land. And that's when evictions began in substance. They'd been off and on for a long time, but this was really when it began to be a pretty massive kind of process. Great. Can you say what some of the factors are that you understand that led up to the formation of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union? Abject poverty was one of the reasons that the union was formed. A lot of people had gotten there living off the land, one way or another, from very poor people to planters who did well. And so there was a whole economy built on growing cotton and on the climate, all those kinds of things that fed into making cotton a very crucial cash crop.

And from that point, as it became harder to make a profit, as the land got old and didn't work very well anymore in terms of growing cotton, people then could make less of a livelihood. There was less land available. The government program fed into that, and they began to be moved off the land and to have serious problems surviving. The South had been poor since at least the Civil War, and there was a lot of that still carrying on and affecting people, land poor, immense numbers of people who had very little way to make money for daily bread. And so they were affected much more than anybody else, but it was a whole layer of society that was affected by whether it was a good year for cotton or a bad year.

When the drought came, that made things even more disastrous. So there was a lot of poverty, a lot of social class differences, a lot of use of power to keep people who were already low income down and to keep them from being independent or really able to have any initiative to take care of their own lives. And can you tell me about some of the early discussions within the Union about whether to be interracial, and what did it mean to go with that decision in the 1930s in the South? Apparently very early, as I recall it, recall my dad and others talking about it, it was a subject of discussion. It was one of the moral issues the Union had to face. The other one was violence versus nonviolence.

But this was a very early one. I'm sorry, can you tell me what the discussion was? Oh, alright. So you can just start over. The discussion in the Union about whether to be interracial or not started from the very beginning. And people argued that it would be better because whites had some advantage to have it all white. People argued that it would be better to have it combined. One man apparently in the discussion said, you can't do it without us and we can't do it without you. And so it was decided that it would be valuable and essential even to work together. Couldn't be two unions, that wouldn't work. So one union, they could then concentrate on all the forces they had to deal with and not have to cope with each other and the differences that two different unions might have. There were also other organizations in the South that were interracial at the time

and that had laid a foundation for that kind of idea. It was not entirely new. It was rare still, but not entirely new. So some groundwork had been laid for that and there were people who had plenty of interracial experience up until then and for whom it seemed like a very natural, normal thing to do. Not normal maybe, but at least essential to do in the formation of a union. Was there anything that was different about the decision for this union of sharecroppers and tenants to be interracial? Was there anything unique about that? Was there anything that was different about what they were taking on in the South during the 30s? What they were taking on in the South in the 30s was a very strong, powerful system which had become very settled in, in terms of the whole cotton economy. And I think it was clear to them that it was going to be necessary to be unified.

That, practically speaking, not just morally or in other kinds of ways, practically speaking it was the only way to work it and there were precedents. Can you tell me about the discussion around violence and nonviolence? And also what the people who had guns you were telling me in the commissaries wouldn't sell them bullets, things like that. Okay. Another major discussion was whether or not they should carry guns because there were guns every place. There was a meeting whenever the sheriffs showed up or the planters, they all carried guns. It was very much a part of the almost mystique of power that was frightening and controlling. And the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were part of the union had a discussion early on about whether or not they should carry guns. And just in terms of showing self defense, showing that they also had some rights.

The argument apparently went back and forth and occasionally it came up again when they were just being harassed so severely. And the decision was that it should be nonviolent. There were people like my father who played into that very much, who believed that it should be nonviolent. He one time was crossing the Mississippi River into Arkansas and he had been hunting and he had some shells in the car. And he stopped and pitched them because he didn't want to be found if a sheriff stopped him. He didn't want to be found with any bullets in the car. So it was very clear once they decided that that it made a lot of sense to be nonviolent in their whole approach to it. For a lot of practical as well as ideological reasons. And the members of the union themselves sometimes carried guns with them.

They had a difficult time in many instances finding bullets for the guns because at the stores that were controlled by the planters, the store owners were told not to sell bullets to the tenant farmers and sharecroppers on that particular farm. Because they might be dangerous. So they had very little access to bullets. And they would still carry the guns symbolically as sort of match. You know, you can show your power but we've got some guns too. But most of the time when they carried them into the meetings with them to protect, basically they talked about protecting the women and children who went to the meetings. They had guns with no bullets in them. Can you tell me what the goals of the union were? What was the union trying to do? The union's major goals were to try to improve life for a group of people who seemed to have through no fault of their own

become stuck in an economic situation in the south. Where they had no say. Their rights were totally absent, black and white alike. They had no protections under law, under any kind of situation or system. And they were pretty desperate. In many instances desperate. Life was pretty cheap. People were killed rather easily. Lynching was going on pretty frequently. And there were a few whites lynched as well as many blacks. Occasionally women were lynched. We rolled out. Okay. Ah, too. I may have been getting a little far. No, no, actually. Okay, that was the end of take. That was good. That was good. Two and the end of camera roll 315 dash 95. We're going to camera roll 315 96 now. Our next take will be take three.

Speed. Take three. Marker. Okay, so if you can tell me about the vision of how sharecroppers and tenants ought to be able to live. What the goals of the union were. I think the goals early on were pretty modest. That somehow. I'm sorry. I had my bottle there. I went quite pretty quick. Okay. I think the goals of the union early on were pretty modest. They hoped to get life for people to be much better. That they could count on some income on a regular basis. They wouldn't have to move on from farm to farm because conditions were so bad wherever they went. And they keep hoping that something would be better the next farm that they go to. And so initially the goals were simple to improve life for people. Also for people to have some sense of what rights were about in this country.

And that poor people could have rights. Poor people could have some access to a better life. Even if it just meant that you could have at least one good meal a day or one minimal meal a day. So that their children could be healthier. There was an immense amount of illness. A lot of pellagra. A lot of malaria. Other kinds of problems. And in spite of that, there was still for some reason some hope. People had not given up entirely. Which is why I think they were ready for what the organizers were trying to do. So the organizers in effect kind of lit a fire. And all the potential was there. It just took some people who had the ideas. Some experience with organizing. And they came from a lot of different backgrounds. The organizers of the union. But their goals eventually became more substantial in that they thought of setting up model farms.

Where men and women, black and white, could show that they could grow things together. Work together. Work for each other. Not have to have a major power system in place in order to be productive. And so I think the goals evolved as they went along were not so major to start with. They had hopes. But had no idea that a sit down would be effective. Or that a strike when people would move out from terrible circumstances and even worse circumstances to make a point could possibly be very effective. But it would be worth trying. Can you tell me what drew your father to the union? Why this was something that he wanted to be a part of? My dad was a Virginian. And he grew up in a family with strong social values.

His mother in particular was influential in his development of these values. He took the values about people being equal, being having rights, having needs that should be met, being responsible and so forth. He took those with him from his family. He was also a very religious person. And in an unusual or fairly unfrequently found kind of way. In that he could very well practice his religion outside of the church as well as in the institutional church. In fact he never held a church as a minister except early on in his days of training and preparation. He always practiced it out in the field when he got ready to pursue it. So he had been active in a number of organizations earlier. He had been involved in student organizations, a variety of kinds of organizations.

His principles were well in place, his values were in place. He thought it was abysmal when people could treat each other so badly across class or whatever. You were telling me that early on Mitchell was writing him letters. And that he just knew how to grab them and sucker him right in. What do you think he told him about the union specifically that drew in your father? In 1934 a lot of organizations were getting going interracial ones. But sometime during that year Mitchell wrote my dad a letter and asked him if he knew of any people who would be good organizers for the union. And my dad had already heard about the union and that it was organizing but he was tied up at the time doing some other work and couldn't get loose to go check it out. Eventually, and he responded to Mitchell and of course that was kind of a hook that pulled Eventually, I think the next early part of 1935, Norman Thomas asked him to go and check into what was happening in the Delta and essentially check into what the union was trying to organize.

So that was his motivator to get him there. And from then on he became active with it. He was never full time with it but he was very active much of his time with the union. Do you remember what your father told you about meetings? How they would spread word that a meeting was going to happen? What kinds of meetings there were? There were lots of different kinds of meetings. There were small groups that would meet in homes. Sometimes they met in churches. Any place they could find that seemed to be relatively safe as far as they could tell. Or quiet so that people, the planters and powers that be, the sheriffs, did not know where they were meeting. So early on there had to be a fair amount of secrecy and quietness about it. So it was in a variety of kinds of settings that they held early meetings. Then, there was a network. I mean people always have networks, ways to spread the word that something's going on. And I mean neighborhoods are all sorts of things.

They don't have to be just geographical. And there was a neighborhood across the south and in communities and across these states. And people spread the word there's going to be a meeting. And they had ways to do that. You could do that whether you were hoeing cotton or just passing somebody on a path or a road and spread the word. So people got ways very quickly of spreading the idea there was going to be a meeting that night in such and such a church. And then people would show and turn up in droves sometimes, three or four hundred, for a meeting. Can you tell me about the role of music in people's lives and in the union? And what about that music would bond people together? What would it give people? The role of music is an interesting one. I think that for southerners it's always been a part of life. And it wasn't novel to use it as part of the union and for it to be part of the union experience. Most of us grew up singing spirituals.

Most of us grew up learning some folk songs. Most of us grew up singing as we did whatever chores there were around the house, sweeping the porch or whatever it might be. So people sang a lot in those days. I don't think perhaps that's so frequent now. But sang a lot. And it was common to start off meetings. We all knew hymns in common. So there was a whole background of music. And people were creating music all the time about social events as well, which added to the folk music. So it was very natural to pull on hymns, to pull on spirituals. We shall not be moved, for example, as a very basic way to draw people together. Because they shared that as part of the culture. Black and white together. And music always helps bond and inspire people. And this was an excellent way. Although it was spontaneous much of the time. Very natural. Sometimes it was planned. But it was part of people's expression of their hopes, of their distress, of their willingness to come together and try some things to see if they could make life better for everybody.

Getting into the opposition to the union. Who was the opposition? What kinds of things did they do? The opposition to the union was very broadly based. It was that economic system that was already in place. It involved planters. It involved cotton brokers. It involved deputy sheriffs. The whole law enforcement establishment. It involved merchants. So there was a whole layer of society which had a lot of power and control over these people who had no place to call home. And that was what was exercised to keep people in their place. White and black alike.

And so out of that exercise of power, people were very frightened. People felt harassed. People were in danger much of the time. Just to even meet and talk about something that might challenge the powers that existed was threatening to the powers that existed. So out of that came immense fear, immense threat to people's well being because anything could happen anytime. I think because it was unpredictable, it added to the terror that could be exercised. And I think that was knowingly done. That sheriffs and police and planters knew that if people just randomly stopped people in their cars just driving around, that that could be scary. That throwing people out of their homes.

That stopping people on the road just walking to and fro, dirt roads someplace, and saying they wanted to check on them or move them to some other place was very effective in having a major amount of intimidation which was present in every minute of their lives. So it took an immense amount of courage to begin to challenge that and say maybe together, none of us separately, but maybe together we could pull something off. Maybe we could begin to organize something and say we can't have anymore. There's enough. And something's got to get better. We do have some rights just because we're poor. Just because we're poor we don't. We rolled out on the last one. How do you know when it's rolling out? Michael doesn't know. Okay. That's the end of camera roll 315 dash 96. And that was take number three.

That's the end of the sound roll. Thank you.