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Look Back: Sharecroppers, 1939
Date: 1/20/2012 Album ID: 1399124
Photos by Arthur Witman and Jack Schutz, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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by Tim O'Neil --- Evicted suddenly from the cotton fields, homeless sharecroppers set up ramshackle camps along two major highways in southeast Missouri in January of 1939. Most of the sharecroppers were black. Some were white. Icy drizzle and snow fell upon them all.
Sharecroppers who had been evicted from farms in southeast Missouri beginning New Year's Day 1939 gather along U.S. Highway 61 near Hayti, Mo., on Jan. 11, 1939. About 1,500 banished sharecroppers and their families built makeshift living quarters along U.S. highways 60 and 61, the major U.S. routes through southeast Missouri. Passing motorists soon spread the word, and St. Louis newspapers began running regular stories and photographs. (Post-Dispatch)
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Some of the banished sharecroppers gather for prayer along a roadside. Post-Dispatch photographers Arthur Witman and Jack Schutz took many photographs of the sharecropper families. (Post-Dispatch)
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Homeless sharecroppers try to stay warm around an iron stove they took with them after landlords forced them from the shacks that dotted the cotton fields. They also took their furniture, but had to endure freezing rain and snow while living along the highways. (Post-Dispatch)
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As their pet keeps watch, two children sleep on a roadside near Sikeston, Mo., on Jan. 15, 1939. (Post-Dispatch)
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Two more of the sharecropper children. Most of the affected families were black, but families of both races shared the roadsides and the troubles. (Post-Dispatch)
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A sharecropper is up for dawn next to his roadside home, made of blankets secured over wooden stakes. (Post-Dispatch)
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Children peer from their tents on U.S. 61 near Hayti, Mo. (Post-Dispatch)
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Evicted sharecroppers walk along a southeast Missouri highway. The sad tale was an unintended consequence in a change in federal crop-assistance payments. The federal government said it would begin sending part of the payments in 1939 directly to sharecroppers, who lived on other farmers' lands and earn a share of what they raised. Some landlords decided to evict the sharecroppers, keep the full payments to themselves and hire back their help as day laborers. (Arthur Witman/Post-Dispatch)
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Another view of the same exodus. (Arthur Witman/Post-Dispatch)
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A Missouri Highway Patrol trooper (left) monitors the movement of sharecroppers from a roadside. The farmers are hauling an old bedspring stripped of cloth. (Post-Dispatch)
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The Rev. Owen Whitfield, an evicted sharecropper and a leader of the protest, became vice president of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. He, his wife and their 11 children had worked on a farm in Missouri's Bootheel. During the protests along the highways, Whitfield traveled to St. Louis and spoke on Jan. 22, 1939, at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers hall, 1722 Washington Avenue. About 600 people attended the meeting and contributed $100 for the sharecroppers by passing hats. (Post-Dispatch).
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A small but typical sharecropper shack in the fertile flatland of southeast Missouri. (Post-Dispatch)
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Members of the Missouri Agricultural Workers Council, affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations labor movement, picket on behalf of the sharecroppers outside the Missouri Democratic Party convention at the St. Louis Municipal Auditorium (later known as Kiel Auditorium) on April 16, 1940. (Post-Dispatch)
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In summer 1939, the federal government established 10 rural villages in southeast Missouri for dispossessed sharecroppers after landlords threw them off the farms. This is a classroom for the children of white sharecroppers. The signs along the wall promote businesses and politicians who chipped in. (Post-Dispatch)
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Main Street in Cropperville, southwest of Poplar Bluff, Mo., one of the villages built mainly by the federal government for exiled sharecropping families. The photo was taken in August 1942. Cropperville was near the Little Black River, north of U.S. Highway 160. Eighty of the 95 families who lived there were blacks. The villages lasted only a few years. A stone monument marks the location of Cropperville. Local black Baptist congregations still use it for summer gatherings. (Post-Dispatch)
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Elbirta Fleming prepares lunch for her brothers and sisters, and some friends, in her family's home in Cropperville in August 1942. (Post-Dispatch)
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Three children in the school building at Cropperville, Mo., in 1942. Many of the items were donated. (Post-Dispatch)
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Whalen Ellison, a teacher from nearby Poplar Bluff, teaches an adult night class in Cropperville in 1942. (Post-Dispatch)
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Mabel Matze, one of the Quakers who moved to Cropperville to help, checks on the treatment of a skin ailment on a young residents. (Post-Dispatch)
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A farmer and his mule plow up a potato patch at Cropperville. (Post-Dispatch)
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