The Great Depression; Interview with Ward Rodgers. Part 1

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Mark.

WARD RODGERS:

Well, I wanna tell you today about my arrest at Marked Tree, Arkansas, in 19, in January, about the middle of January in 1935. It's important because, it had, it was on the front page of, [unintelligible] most newspapers across the country. New York Times, from then on, they wanted to see anything that Mitchell or anybody wrote. And, it's what, it was the first publicity we'd had, really. I was a worker's education teacher, federal teacher at the time, but I was also on the board of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union, and Mitchell had taken a group of sharecroppers with him to Washington, D.C., to try to get the Roosevelt administration to move. But he was due back on that day, and he had wired me to chair the meeting, and they'd get there hopefully before the crowd left, and they did. This was right in the middle of Marked Tree, there was a platform there, we'd been using it from time to time, and everybody else did too, see? The sharecroppers and other people in Tyronza and Marked Tree especially, planters and sharecroppers were all out, four or five hundred of them. Platform was about five feet high, and there was only two places to climb up on. I opened the meeting, and told them about the night before, at the, the superintendent of schools in Tyronza had visited the country schoolhouse where I was to have class on unionism, which I was supposed to do as a federal teacher, and they broke up the meeting, and the superintendent wanted to see me the next morning, which happened to be the morning of the day that we held this afternoon meeting. He had threatened me, if I didn't stop those kinds of meetings in his country schools, so he had to, see that you didn't do any more. He did it in a threatening way, and I said, well, that sounds like a Klu Klux Klan measure. And he said, well yeah, it is. So I didn't argue with him anymore, but that was the background of my talk at, and I said that day that I could recruit enough sharecroppers to lynch any plantation owner in the whole Poinsett County. That of course, the sharecroppers were enthusiastic about it, threw up their hats in the air, and the planters were there, you could tell they weren't, they were mad about everything I was saying, so I thought I'd said about enough, so I called McKinney to the platform. He was our vice-president, and he was one of those people who could sing, and he could lead sings, songs, we had several of them. I turned the meeting over to McKinney, and I noticed that the sheriff and one of his deputies and his secretary were at one corner, and I figured that they were gonna to arrest me, so I went to, there was only two corners where you could get up and down on that five foot platform, so I just walked right, straight to him, and sure enough, they took a hold of my arm and walked me to, around the corner, to where they, they had an office there for the deputies and for the prosecuting, assistant prosecuting attorney, who was also present. While we were in there, the clerk, who had taken down, I guess, most of what I said, and she was translating from, put it in, she used a typewriter, she translated from her fast writing. A couple of the deputies came in there and told the sheriff, the crowd's getting, it's gonna be, they figured they couldn't control the crowd. See, they were gonna take me to Harrisburg, the county seat, and they were afraid to take me to the car, because they were afraid that the sharecroppers would take me away from them, you see. The sheriff told them to, well, tell them to move back, out of the way. Oh no, they won't do it. Pay no attention to what I, I says, Well, let me talk to them. I didn't wait 'til the sheriff answered, I walked right straight out and stayed right in front of the door, and it was at that time—oh yeah, the assistant prosecuting attorney says, \"Oh, Rodgers, they'll do what you want to,\" and I said, \"That's right.\" Sure enough, McKinney, after I had told him to get clear out of sight, and they did. Then the, there was three deputy sheriffs in the back seat, and the sheriff and I were in the front seat, and we went over to the county seat.

DANTE J. JAMES:

OK, let's stop right here.

WARD RODGERS:

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:

This is good.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Mark. Mark two.

DANTE J. JAMES:

All right. You turned the meeting over to Mr. McKinney.

WARD RODGERS:

McKinney, he was our first, the only vice-president we had.

INTERVIEWER:

I want you to say, when it was time for me to turn the meeting over to Mr. McKinney, our vice-president...

WARD RODGERS:

Yeah. I decided to introduce him like he was, Mr. McKinney, and I knew that the planters wouldn't like that at all. He was our vice-president, and he, in fact he'd been active in the World War, World War I.

DANTE J. JAMES:

OK, let's stop for a second. Let's stop. Stop.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Line. Mark.

WARD RODGERS:

Introducing McKinney to carry on the meeting, he was, he's black, and he's also our vice-president, and he's been active in the organizations for years. But the reason I thought, McKinley, I just called him Mac, or—I called him \"Mister\" because I knew the planters wouldn't like it, and I was correct on that. But this incident was picked up by the newspapers, and we were on the front page of those papers for a long time. A lot of people didn't know what a sharecropper was, but the time Norman Thomas started on a tour and explained about the sharecroppers, they learned, before, but—

DANTE J. JAMES:

OK, that's good, stop right there. Stop.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Line. Mark.

DANTE J. JAMES:

You can begin.

WARD RODGERS:

Mitchell once asked me about, he knew that he and I had both been in tight situation, and we could have been attacked many times. He asked, and he helped me answer the question too, about, why do we take such chances, you know. Well, I says, well, you and I, we find something that has to be done, we just up and do it. My own mind was, the white sharecroppers had been joining as fast as the blacks were joining the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union, but enough whites that the planters didn't know who to call upon to do his dirty work. The bosses didn't know who to depend on for help, and that's why we, there was people injured, 'cause they would drive past houses where the sharecroppers lived and try to shoot in there, and sometimes they'd hit people. I was in and out of a lot of those homes.

DANTE J. JAMES:

Good. Stop.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Line, mark.

WARD RODGERS:

In Tyronza, before the union was organized, there was a Socialist Party group that Mitchell and others of his friends that he'd explained Socialism to, they were active. But Thomas, when he was down there at a state convention in Tyronza, he told them afterwards that, well, you don't need a Socialist Party here, what you really need is a union. And then that's how we got started on a union.

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me about the reasons why—just let it roll—tell me about the reasons why the Union had to be interracial. You told me yesterday about the Elaine Massacre, which was, happened sometime before in Arkansas, so tell me about why, the same reasons you told me yesterday, about why it had to be interracial.

WARD RODGERS:

Well, I, I made a survey, what was printed about the Elaine Massacre in the Memphis papers. See, it happened right after World War I—'18, '17 or '18, '19—I don't know exactly the time now, and I had a little time, and I went to one of the libraries in Memphis, and I was getting papers, and the man who was in charge of the research. He got interested in what I was doing, and he would find, dig up anything he could on the Elaine Massacre. Thing was, it was only black, it was a black union, none of the whites joined, and furthermore, none of the whites in Arkansas or any other state helped them. And first, after they had, the Massacre, finally there was a lawyer from Kansas that came down there to help them with some of their cases. But, and that's, I said well, I told the librarian, well, that our picture's not like that, we got both races standing together, have from the beginning. That, that made the big difference.

INTERVIEWER:

Now I need for you just to pick up and tell me what happened at the Elaine Massacre, I mean, they were at a meeting, and, tell me what happened, OK? And how these people got killed, and who killed them.

WARD RODGERS:

Well, it was, killed by the Klu Klux Klan.

DANTE J. JAMES:

No, at the Elaine Massacre, there, at the—

WARD RODGERS:

They didn't have a chance at all, to—well, they didn't have ammunition, even if they had a gun. The Elaine sharecroppers, they were trying to get better wages, and the sharecropper, he gets half, is supposed to get half of the money, depending on the weight of that cotton they brought in. But the gin, they would give all the money to the planters, and the planters are supposed to divide it up too, but most of them didn't.

DANTE J. JAMES:

Let's stop. That's good.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Ward Rodgers, take six up.

WARD RODGERS:

He was staying at the big hotel, which was quite close to the—

DANTE J. JAMES:

OK, the question is, did you realize—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Line, mark.

DANTE J. JAMES:

You may begin.

WARD RODGERS:

What, when you, at, we didn't know how far we'd be able to go...but actually, before we got through with February, we knew that we had attracted the attention of the country, and if we won, why, we're really gonna be down as a real progress. For instance, one of the writers in the New York Times had a series of articles, and, just, I'm gonna be talking about myself. The guy says 'Well, there's lots of trouble brewing in the delta section of Arkansas, and in the center of that is a young Methodist preacher, Ward Rodgers', see. Course, we hadn't thought about it getting all that publicity, but, it continued, and Mitchell was awful good on, if something happened, he could write just a few words and send it off to Washington and New York.

DANTE J. JAMES:

We're out. We're out of film.