Southern Tenant Farmers Union: Interracial Organizing Against New Deal Exclusion

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded in Tyronza, Arkansas on July 26, 1934 by Black and white sharecroppers, organized 25,000 members across five states by 1936 to protest AAA evictions and demand fair treatment under New Deal programs. The STFU was deliberately interracial in a region where that was dangerous; founding members included H.L. Mitchell, Clay East, and Black organizer E.B. McKinney. Planters responded with evictions, beatings, and murders of organizers. Arkansas Governor J.M. Futrell dismissed organizers as Communist agitators. The union documented AAA abuses that national journalists eventually exposed.