An Overview of Southern Tenant Farmers Union:
The STFU full form is Southern Tenant Farmer Union. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), which was established in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, has long piqued historians’ interest. They have highlighted its biracial membership and the socialist beliefs of its leaders while attributing its demise to outside forces like the mechanization of agriculture, the suppression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers.
The perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union’s rank and file, however, has been largely neglected in such narratives, as James Ross points out in this intriguing revisionist history. In this article, we are going to see the STFU’s rise and fall in detail.
The Rise and Fall of STFU in Arkansas:
Ross demonstrates that internal conflicts were at least as important—if not more so—than external factors in the organization’s eventual downfall by drawing on a vast collection of letters that STFU members addressed to union leaders, representatives of the government, and other individuals. The STFU’s fatal fault was significantly the stark contrast between the leadership’s and the membership’s worldviews. Ross explains how Southern Tenant Farmer Union secretary H. L. Mitchell initially emphasized the union as one with many voices, perodically in harmony and occasionally in conflict, but later pushed a more streamlined narrative of a small number of people handling the majority of the union’s work.
The STFU full form is Southern Tenant Farmer Union. Ross investigates the actual aspirations of the rank and file and what union membership meant to them in light of this enormous transformation, which has left him shaken. White members frequently did not, he adds, “despite the white leaders’ possible expressions of a commitment to racial justice.” Despite the socialist and communist leaders of the union’s hopes for shared land ownership, the members frequently did not.