Nancy Neale Discusses the Formation of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (1993)

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.