Missouri Sharecropper Strike of 1939

One wintry morning in January 1939, residents of Southeast Missouri woke to find two thousand black & white sharecroppers alongside two state highways. With them were their families and the few meager belongings that they owned.

The sharecroppers left the Missouri Bootheel cotton plantations where they lived and worked, to stage a demonstration. They were protesting ‘The Agricultural Adjustment Act,’ of 1938, a federal law from President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The act reduced production by paying farmers subsidies to not plant on part of their land and to kill off excess livestock. This was to reduce any surplus in crops and to increase the market value of crops. Plantation owners were supposed to share the subsidies with the sharecroppers living on and working the fields, however, plantation owners found a loophole in this policy and kept the subsidies owed to the sharecroppers by firing them and hiring day laborers instead.

African American minister, ‘Owen H. Whitfield, a sharecropper and Vice-President of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union,’ was dedicated to creating better conditions for farm workers. He planned and led the demonstration and convinced the sharecroppers that this demonstration would draw public attention to their plight.

Whitfield told the sharecroppers: “Take your eyes out of the sky, because someone is stealing your bread.”