The Changing Face of Sharecropping and Tenancy
by Jeannie M. Whayne
The sharecropping and tenancy system, which arose in the South in the years after
the Civil War, had many faces, none of them enviable or evocative of prosperity. It evolved
in the postbellum period as many planters struggled to secure and maintain an adequate
supply of labor, and it reached its zenith in the early twentieth century only to suffer a
shock as African Americans began to depart the South during World War I, a departure
that did not abate, a departure that left an increasing number of planters scrambling for
labor. Then sharecropping and tenancy began to undergo a profound transition during the
1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as a result of New Deal programs, World War II, mechanization,
and the use of chemicals. The plantation became a capital intensive rather than labor
intensive enterprise. In other words, tenants and sharecroppers were no longer needed, and
by 1960, sharecroppers, who had once dominated the plantation labor force, had become
so uncommon that the category (sharecropper) was dropped from the United States Census
of Agriculture.1
Sharecropping emerged in the late 1860s as a kind of compromise between
emancipated slaves, who wanted to own their own farms, and planters, who wanted to
operate their plantations as usual, using closely supervised gang labor. In essence, and,
truth be told, their greatest desire was a return to an unfree labor system. But slavery was
dead, or nearly so, and planters were forced to face that fact as well as the fact that they
did not have the cash to pay wages, and wages were something a free labor system
required. Emancipated slaves had their own harsh reality, that is that the federal
government was not going to confiscate and redistribute plantation lands to freedmen.
After fighting a bloody and terrible war over slavery, the United States government
abandoned those who had been enslaved. Their dreams of "forty acres and a mule" were
simply not to be realized. So, sharecropping, whereby planters paid freedmen a share of
the crop in lieu of cash emerged. Freedmen gained something in this compromise -- they
worked their own 25 to 40 acre plots of land free of the close supervision that had been
common under slavery. No matter that the housing was of sub-standard quality, that
educational facilities were practically non-existent in the countryside, and that professional
healthcare rarely reached African Americans or, for that matter, poor white southerners.
According to economists Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, the sharecropping and
tenancy system might have worked out to the mutual advantage of both planters and
freedmen, but planters, through their influence with state legislators, passed a series of laws
which disadvantaged those who worked on shares and which limited their mobility.2
Together with the rise of the commissary system which tied sharecroppers to the planters
by whom they were employed by debt, these laws worked against the interests of
sharecroppers, most of whom were black. Even as the black sharecropping system was
growing and maturing in the South, white tenancy began to develop. Whites, some of
whom had once been landowners, began to work on plantations too, but they brought more
to the bargaining table then did freedmen. Whites tended to own their own mules and
implements and were able to secure a larger share of the crop. And, in fact, according to
law, they actually owned the crop and paid planters a share of it in exchange for use of the
land. This seems like a small difference between sharecroppers and tenants, but in law it
had the potential to fundamentally separate the two categories of "labor" (sharecroppers
and tenants). Of course, some blacks were able to acquire enough property to become
tenant farmers, and, in the meantime, some whites without property engaged in
sharecropping arrangements. But two other things separated black and white agricultural
laborers: racism and economic competition. In fact, those two things went hand-in-hand
as whites bent on driving blacks off plantations so they (whites) could take the plantation
jobs, became a distinct problem in the 1890s and early twentieth century, so problematic,
in fact, that in at least one instance, in 1903 planters hired white detectives to protect black
labor and hunt down white nightriders. For planters the issue was economic. Black labor
was much cheaper, more affordable, than white labor. Thus a divide existed between black
and white labor, and it was a divide that planters sometimes found useful and sometimes
found inconvenient. This had significant consequences for African Americans.3
The historiography is rich on sharecropping and tenancy. In fact, the status and
relative opportunities open to black sharecroppers has animated a debate between
economists and historians of the twentieth century South. In one view, emancipated slaves
received "nothing but freedom" and planters, with the help of southern legislatures, enacted
laws which reduced freedmen to another kind of slavery. Because they were able to retain
possession of their real property, planters survived the Civil War largely intact, and
although they had to make some concessions to freedmen -- namely acquiescing to the
creation of sharecropping -- they erected institutional constraints which seriously eroded
many of the gains freedmen made immediately following the war.4 An alternative view
stresses the gains that freedmen allegedly made in the post Civil War South, dismisses the
institutional constraints created by planters, minimizes the impact of racism, and points to
the existence of a regional labor market, within which blacks were free to move, as
evidence that blacks were not bound up in another kind of slavery. Neo-classical
economists have gone so far as to suggest that blacks did not suffer exceptional
discrimination as laborers in the market and that they, in fact, benefitted substantially from
their new mobility.5
Neoclassical economist Gavin Wright, for example, argues that "despite the
existence of racism and segregation, market pressures were strong enough to very nearly
equalize the wages of black and white unskilled labor."6 But Wright also writes that there
are limitations to the view "that the free market in labor is the enemy of racial distinctions."7
In fact, "by the 1920s, the work experience and educational histories of the two races had
become so different that explicit or implicit racial wage differentials began to appear."8
These remarks on Wright's part seem to be related principally, if not solely, to labor outside
of agriculture, and he goes on to argue that "blacks were not literally confined to
agriculture, but only in agriculture was there much realistic hope for economic as opposed
to geographic mobility."9
To what extent did African Americans employed in agriculture enjoy economic and
geographic mobility? In fact, to what extent do we find that either category of landless
laborers - black sharecroppers or white tenants - enjoyed anything resembling prosperity?
Because the Arkansas delta was undergoing a vast expansion of its plantation system in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century, African Americans and whites alike flocked to
the area in order to embrace the opportunities they believed existed there. Thus the
situation in Arkansas serves as an example of the possibilities open to black and white
labor. A shortage of labor should have made for greater opportunities for laborers - higher
wages, better conditions - but, in fact, what they were to find in Arkansas was no different
from what they left behind in Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Mississippi:
that is, economic, legal, and extralegal exploitation and, ultimately, severe limits on their
ability to share in the bounty that Arkansas's rich delta promised. They came to Arkansas
with high expectations, partly because of the rumors they had heard about the fertility of
the soil and partly as a result of the blandishments of labor agents who were canvassing the
older South looking to fill the needs of Arkansas planters hungry for labor. One ex-slave,
Talitha Lewis, said she had heard from labor agents that Arkansas "had fritter trees and a
molasses pond," and that all you had to do was "shake the tree and the fritters would fall
in the pond." Talitha was a child and may have taken the message seriously, but her
parents were likely more convinced by the images of land that had yet to be over-cultivated,
land that was producing from one to two bales an acre. That message, for the adults, was
irresistible.10
A small antebellum planter aristocracy existed in the delta, principally in the
southeastern section, but even there the plantation system was expanding as new lands were
being brought into cultivation.11 The evolution of one 3,000 acre plantation,12 Sunnyside,
from an antebellum slave plantation to a plantation that employed the sharecropping and
tenancy system, is illustrative of the typical postbellum arrangement and reveals the lengths
to which planters were willing to go to secure labor. Once owned by Elisha Worthington,
the largest slave owner in Arkansas before the Civil War, Sunnyside was located in Chicot
County, the county on the southeastern border of Arkansas. Sunnyside passed through a
succession of owners in the 1870s and 1880s, including, at one point, the grandsons of John
C. Calhoun. The Calhouns had formed a company, employed overseers to manage the
plantation, and utilized several forms of labor arrangements. They paid cash wages, they
used tenants who furnished their own tools and implements, and they employed the
sharecropping system. They operated their own plantation commissary, requiring their
employees to purchase their supplies there.13 But the Sunnyside plantation under the
Calhouns did not prosper, largely because of a few bad crop years, and thus they sold their
interest to a New York financier, Austin Corbin, who found it nearly impossible to secure
enough plantation labor. African Americans were not content to work under a "foreigner"
and with the withdrawal of the Calhouns, found it more expedient to use the opportunity
to depart. Thus Corbin was forced to think creatively about how to furnish labor for his
plantation. He came up with a unique solution. He brought over workers from northern
Italy - and it was not that difficult to encourage people to immigrate as Italy itself was
going through a fundamental transformation called the Risorgimento, and tens of thousands
of Italians departed their home country for a variety of locations.14 Corbin's scheme was
to divide up the plantation into distinct farms and sell them to the Italians. But the
agricultural economy proved resistant to recovery and conditions in the swamps of
Arkansas were unlike anything the Italians had ever encountered. Then Corbin died in a
carriage accident, his heirs floundered around with the experiment, the Italians departed,
and by the time Sunnyside came into the hands of three Mississippi men, it had gone
through two seasons without producing a crop. The Mississippians, Leroy Percy and two
merchants and cotton factors, Hamilton R. Hawkins and Orlando B. Crittenden, determined
to reinvigorate and transform the experiment with Italian labor. Instead of bringing over
Italians to purchase pieces of it, they intended to work them as tenants and sharecroppers.
They employed the mechanisms of control that planters were using elsewhere, that is they
kept them in debt and used the law to enforce their contracts and keep them on the
plantations. When some discontented Italians reached the Italian consulate in New Orleans,
however, Percy and his business partners learned that the Italians had an ally that black and
white poor Americans did not have: The Italian government. One cannot argue that the
controversy threatened to turn into an international incident, but suffice it to say that the
State Department got into the act. The U.S. Attorney General's office sent an investigator
who wrote reports which described in detail the manner in which the Italians were being
exploited and the horrible conditions they endured.15
African Americans had played a role in the drama that unfolded at Sunnyside by
refusing to remain in place. Where had they gone? It is likely that some of them went to
Kansas with the exodusters, but many merely moved to other plantations in the area, and
some of them may have ended up in Phillips County, Arkansas, a place that was itself
destined to capture a share of the controversial history of tenancy and sharecropping.
Phillips County is located along the Mississippi River, a little less than half way up the
Arkansas delta from Chicot County. It too had something of an antebellum plantation
economy, but it was smaller and less developed than that in Chicot County. But like Chicot
County, Phillips County underwent a dramatic transformation in the late nineteenth century
as thousands of acres of land were brought into cultivation. Violence and nightriding
against African Americans occurred throughout the period and generally pitted white
tenants against black sharecroppers, enough so that planters occasionally complained about
the "low down white men" who threatened to drive off black labor.16 But fate was destined
to drive planters and those "low down white men" together in 1919, when black
sharecroppers determined to assert their rights and sue planters for a fair crop settlement.
It all began when one Arkansas sharecropper, Robert Hill, began to speak to African
American sharecroppers in the area about organizing a union, the Progressive Farmers and
Household Union of America, and convinced them to hire a prominent white attorney in
Little Rock, Ulysses S. Bratton, to represent them in suits they intended to file against
planters for a fair settlement of the crop. It had become a commonplace practice for
planters to "cheat" their white and black tenants and sharecroppers by a manipulation of
the books. Black sharecroppers were particularly vulnerable, not merely because they were
less likely to be literate and thus unable to examine the books, but also because they were
black . White planters tolerated no challenge, whether verbal or otherwise, from African
Americans. But the black experience in World War I, wherein black soldiers who served
abroad experienced better treatment, made many of them less willing to accept the status
quo once they returned home. Planters and other whites, however, wanted precisely that:
a return to the racial status quo. One manifestation of black discontent was the founding
of the union and the hiring of U.S. Bratton. Whites in the area viewed with alarm the new
"militancy" on the part of African Americans and either deliberately or innocently
misinterpreted it. They came to believe that blacks were planning to murder them and
appropriate they lands.
Late in the evening of September 30, 1919, black sharecroppers were holding a
union meeting in a church in Hoop Spur outside of Elaine, Arkansas. Tensions were high
and they had posted guards at the door. When two deputized white men and a black
trustee pulled into view, shots rang out. Who fired first is still debated, likely unknowable,
and perhaps not that important. What is important is what transpired afterwards. One of
the white men was killed, the other wounded. The black trustee raced back to Helena, the
county seat of Phillips County, and alerted officials. A posse was dispatched and within a
few hours hundreds of white men, many of them the "low down" variety, began to comb
the area for blacks they believed were launching an insurrection. In the end, five white men
and over a hundred African Americans were killed. Some estimates of the black death toll
range in the hundreds. Allegations surfaced that the white posse and even U.S. soldiers
who were brought in to put down the so called "rebellion" had massacred defenseless black
men, women and children. Nearly a hundred blacks were arrested, and in sham trials that
lasted no more than a few minutes each, sixty-something black men were sentenced to
prison, and twelve were slated for execution. A massive effort on the part of the NAACP
and others, including a prominent black attorney in Little Rock, ensued, and by 1925 all the
men were free. But planters had established that blacks had best not organize, even within
the law, for racism would bring whites of different classes together to put them down.17
What lessons were blacks to learn from this? Leaving an undesirable situation, such
as that which existed at Sunnyside, merely put them in another undesirable location:
Phillips County. And in Phillips County, they discovered that standing their ground,
organizing a union and hiring an attorney, led only to violence and secured them little
justice in a system bent on their exploitation. And what of white tenants, some of whom
had participated in the Elaine massacre? Blinded by racism and motivated by economic
competition with blacks, they were not yet ready to understand that as landless laborers
they had more in common with African American sharecroppers than with the planters who
exploited them both. But this was all about to change.
In some ways, everything that had gone before for agriculture in the way of
depression was all prelude for what was to come in the 1920s and the early 1930s, a
depression so severe that even prominent planters bankrupted. Tenants and sharecroppers
had been impoverished before, but now they were facing starvation. The depression in
agriculture began after the World War I boom ceased, and while other sectors of the
economy experienced the same postwar recession, agriculture was one industry that did not
pull out of it. The great flood of 1927 drove many tenants and sharecroppers into Red
Cross camps and brought their suffering to public attention, but little beyond temporary
relief was afforded them. Indeed, so eager was the Red Cross to avoid disturbing the social
system in place in the delta that they acquiesced in the demands of planters that
sharecroppers and tenants be virtually held prisoner in the camps until their planters "signed
them out".18 The drought of 1930-1931 drove them deeper into poverty, an unimaginable
level of poverty, almost beyond comprehension.19 Even planters had become so desperate,
that they began to reach for solutions they considered too radical just a few years earlier.
They were ready for New Deal programs that required them, if they wanted to participate,
to withdraw up to 30 percent of the acreage of certain crops out of production. In the
delta, that crop, of course, was cotton. In return for participating in the program, planters
received a rental payment from the government and a second check, a "parity" check, if the
crop they did grow and market did not receive the price regarded as adequate to pay the
cost of production and secure an appropriate profit. Tenants and sharecroppers expected
to receive a share of these payments, but in most cases they were excluded for the check
went directly to the person who owned the land and the government, for a time, left it up
to the individual landowner to decide how to distribute it. But that was only half the
problem facing tenants and sharecroppers. For the first time, planters now enjoyed a labor
surplus. They had more labor then they needed. Many of them evicted extraneous tenants,
putting thousands of landless men and their families off the land at a time when the
depression in the industrial marketplace had yet to see relief. In other words, the landless
laborers evicted from plantations in the South had no other place to go, no other jobs they
could secure, even if they had had the training for them.
The response of some in Poinsett County, located in northeastern Arkansas, was
to form a union, only this time it was an integrated union, welcoming both black and white
tenants and sharecroppers. Those who formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union
recognized that landless men of both races faced the same exploitation, the same enemy.
They looked back to the Elaine massacre, which had occurred a decade and a half earlier
and just a few counties south, and drew from it an important lesson. They banded together
so they could not be manipulated against each other. Their demands were simple. First,
that planters cease evicting tenants, and thus they filed suit against a planter in Poinsett
County, Hiram Norcross, who had engaged in massive evictions. Second, they demanded
a share of the New Deal program rental and parity payments. They turned to the federal
government with this second demand. Planters responded typically to the formation of the
Union - with violence. They did not have to exert any undue pressure on the Department
of Agriculture to speak to their interests, for those who ran the agency and the New Deal
program administering the crop reduction scheme understood all too well that Southern
Democrats were an indispensable part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal
coalition. Although tenants and sharecroppers were afforded some relief, in the end, the
planters remained fully in command of the situation and essentially oversaw the transition
from a labor intensive to a capital intensive enterprise.20 This transformation began with
the New Deal and accelerated during World War II, which required previously
unfathomable levels of agricultural production and led to mechanical and chemical
innovations that made labor even less necessary.
Of course, black tenants and sharecroppers were not merely acted upon in this
drama. One way to examine how they experienced the 1930s and how they endured life
in the Jim Crow South, is to listen to the words of a man who worked for one of the largest
plantations in the South and the largest plantation enterprise in the state of Arkansas.
William "Snake" Toney was employed by the Lee Wilson plantation in Mississippi County,
Arkansas, which is in the northeastern corner of the state.21 He tried another alternative.
He neither ran from an intolerable system nor took it on directly. He attempted, for a time,
to manipulate the system, relying on his considerable mechanical skills to make him a
desirable commodity as a laborer and utilizing his natural charm and good nature. He was
not himself an agricultural laborer, but rather he worked in the town of Wilson and thus
came into much closer contact with members of the Wilson family. This would prove to
be crucial to him. The Wilson plantation, founded in the 1880s was at its height when
Snake came to Wilson at the age of seventeen to join his mother who was a domestic
laborer there. Founded by Robert E. Lee Wilson - known as Boss Lee - in the 1880s, it
had grown to encompass seventy thousand acres, was divided into fourteen different
"farms," and had several commissaries, cotton gins, a lumber mill, box factory, and a cotton
oil mill. African Americans made up most of the agricultural labor, whites tended to work
in one of the town businesses. A few blacks held menial jobs in town, and fewer still
secured the better paying positions there. Snake was one such man, but he was to discover
that his opportunities were severely limited.
Wilson had been a lumber man first and turned to agriculture after he cut the trees
and drained the swamps. By the 1930s, his agricultural enterprises were paramount, and
he was himself on the verge of bankruptcy. A loan of two million dollars from the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a federal agency, pulled him back from the brink, and
the crop reduction programs returned him to solvency. Although Boss Lee died before the
STFU emerged, his son was very much alive, as was his business partner, Jim Crain, and
they made certain that the STFU made no inroads on the Wilson plantation. Boss Lee had
run the plantation like a feudal empire, had his own police force, and had the county sheriff
and other county officials indebted to him at the Wilson bank. The founders of the STFU
made a feeble effort to organize in one of the Wilson towns, but soon withdrew, and it is
likely they decided to exert their energies in more promising locations.
Snake Toney has many positive things to say about the Wilson plantation, however,
things which resonate with the oral tradition that has survived. While Wilson orchestrated
every moment of their lives, material conditions, in the way of housing, health care, and
education, were better on the Wilson plantation than they were elsewhere. Then too,
Wilson's black sharecroppers did not have to fear white nightriders attempting to drive
them off the plantation, for Wilson himself had the means to discourage that phenomenon.
While violence aimed at African Americans occurred all around them, they were safe there
on Wilson. Of course, they traded dependence on the Wilson plantation for independence
off it, and evidence suggests that black sharecroppers were able to accumulate more
personal property elsewhere, but still many chose the safety and comfort of the Wilson
plantation to the uncertainty and violence that awaited them off the plantation.
Enter William "Snake" Toney. He arrived in Wilson in 1931 and left in 1942 when
he married and secured employment in Louisville, Kentucky, through his new brother-in-law. In late June of 2002, sixty years after his departure, he passed through Wilson,
Arkansas, and stopped to chat with the current president of the company, Michael Wilson,
the great, great grandson of the founder.
First, a little background on Mr. Toney. He was raised by his grandparents, a
Methodist minister and his wife. He indicated that his grandmother "took him" from his
mother when he was a small child because his mother was fifteen years old when he was
born and his grandmother thought he'd be better off with her. When he was seventeen
years old, he moved to Wilson, Arkansas, where his mother Fanny, was working as a
domestic servant for a prominent family (not the Wilson's). Snake went to school for a
season and then went to work in various Wilson enterprises: the Box Factory, the Cotton
Oil Mill, and the Cotton Gin. Because he worked in town rather than on one of the
fourteen Wilson farms, he became much more familiar with the Wilson family than he
would have otherwise, particularly with Bobby Wilson (the grandson of the founder), who
came back from college in the mid 1930s and was given the responsibility to build a new
cotton oil mill. Snake went to work with Bobby Wilson as a kind of right-hand man and
formed a friendship over the many lunch times they spent together.
According to Snake, while African Americans were "safer" on the Wilson
plantation, there were certain boundaries they could not transgress without subjecting
themselves to violence. If they did transgress these boundaries, they were no longer safe
unless they sought and received the personal protection of a Wilson family member.
Once her son came to Wilson and secured a well-paying job at the Cotton Oil Mill,
Fanny ceased working as a domestic and was staying at home. In the summer of
(approximately) 1938, she was chopping cotton in order to secure some extra spending
money. But one day she decided to stay home and do her own laundry rather than go to
the field. Her "boss man," a Mr. Sonny Lynch, who managed one of the Wilson farms
close to town, came to her house later in the afternoon to inquire why she hadn't come to
work. This is the way Snake put it during an interview conducted in the summer of 2002,
sixty-five years after the incident.
He come by the house and wanted to know why. I'm working at
the oil mill, I work nights, so I'm at home in bed. He come there, he
wanted to know why she wasn't there. And she told him, well, she decided
she didn't want to. She had to wash . . . and she was ironing. And from
the porch through the screen he was talking to her. She kind of got out of
line, he made a few curse words, and she talked back to him and he
threatened to come in the house, and he grabbed the screen door and
snatched it. And by that time I had got up, and I went to the door, and I
was talking to him through the door, and . . . he was talking to me talking
to him, and I wasn't supposed to say nothing 'cause he was Mr. Sonny
Lynch. And he grabbed the door and did like that (motioning) and I
showed him the shot gun . . . you ain't supposed to do that. And . . . he
called me one of them names, and he jumped in his truck and left.
Now, I'm scared. I got to hit out and go down to Mr. Bobby's. . . . . He
. . . . asks me what happened. I told him. He says "are you losing your mind? Goddammit,
(are) you crazy?" I said, "Mr. Bobby, he made me mad." He said, "Well, goddammit, you
ain't supposed to get that mad." So me and him got in his truck and come on down to my
house. Quite naturally there was three or four men there. They had their guns and straps
and things and he told me"Goddammit, you stay in the truck." That's what Mr. Bobby told
me. He got out and he asked em "What the Goddamned hell is going on? . . . . They told
him that so and so drawed a gun on Mr. Sonny. And he told em that my mother didn't
have to chop cotton if she didn't want to because . . . I was working at the oil mill, and she
lived in the oil mill house. Anyway, he got it settled and how there wasn't nothing to it,
and he told them, "Now look, better not a so and so and so thing happen to him. If they
do, everyone of you's going to hit that street. In other words, if anything happened to me
you was going to leave Wilson.
I never had no more problem, but [after the men left the house that day]. . . he told
me "Let me tell you one God damned thing . . . aint you got no better sense than to be . .
. drawing a gun on a white man?" And I said, "Well, Mr. Bobby, he made me mad, and he
was going to snatch the door off my Mama and come in there and whoop me . . . and he
said, "Well, I don't give a damn, couldn't you have run?" I said, yes, I guess I could have."
He was telling me I wasn't supposed to get that mad. In other words, I was supposed to
let him snatch the door I guess if he wanted to and come in there and whoop me, but that
wasn't going to happen.22
The second anecdote speaks to another kind of problem facing African Americans
on the Wilson plantation. In this case, a Mrs. Hoover had asked Fanny to come to work
for her as her domestic servant. Fanny told Mrs. Hoover that she didn't have to work
because her son - Snake - had a good job at the Cotton Oil Mill, and she didn't need to
work. Mrs. Hoover's husband, incidentally, was in charge of the cotton oil mill. In other
words, Snake was working for Mr. Hoover. She wanted to teach Fanny a lesson ,and she
told her husband to "lay off" Snake when the cotton oil mill slowed down during the
summer months. Normally, someone like Snake, who ran a shift at the mill, was kept on
during the summer doing odd jobs at the mill. This is the way Snake put it:
Mrs. Hoover wanted my mother to work for her . . . and my mother
maybe given her sass. So she told Mr. Hoover to not let me work during
the summer and that would learn Fannie a lesson. So that summer when the
mill shut down, I didn't work. So I went to Mr. Landum . . . (who was
building a new cotton gin), and I worked for him that summer. Well . . .
when we got through building the gin, Mr. Landum said, "Snake, I tell you
what. . . you seemed to be pretty familiar with them damned gins . . . you
stay on with me this fall, and I'll give you fifty cents an hour.
So we're about three weeks into September. . . . The seed is
coming to the oil mill. I (was) one of the head guys (at the oil mill) because
I run a shift . . . I (was) the lint room man . . . And I ain't going back to the
oil mill because I can make fifty cents an hour at the cotton gin, and I can't
make but forty at the oil mill. So when Mr. Hoover sent word . . . to tell
me to come on back to work because the mill was starting to running
twenty-four hours, the seed was coming in by truck and train. And I told
him, I said, well, I'm not coming back I'm going to stay out here with Mr.
Landum 'cause I can make fifty cents an hour.
So then Mr. Hoover told Mr. Jim Crain [the company general
manager at the time] that he had one of his so and so's, his best men, was
working for Mr. Landum, and he needed him down to the oil mill. So then,
it was a Saturday evening. We paid off on Saturday . . . And Mr. Landum
would always bring my envelope and give it to me, and I'd just stick it in
my pocket until we got through with all the wagons that was ginning that
day. And we had about two more wagon loads, and Mr. Landum come and
fetch me . . . it was dusky . . . Mr. Hoover and Mr. Crain and Mr. Landum
come in there together. I guess they had been to the big office. . . . Mr.
Landum had my envelope in his hand. . . . Mr. Landum asked me, he says,
"Snake, didn't you tell me that you got laid off at the oil mill? And I said,
"Yes sir." So Mr. Jim Crain asked Mr. Hoover, he said, "Well, if he was
one of your dependable so and so and so and so's, why did you lay him
off?" And that's when I found out what happened. So Mr. Landum told
Mr. Hoover, he said, "Well, I think that was God damned lousy." Mr.
Landum was a little short guy, was outspoken, and he didn't bite his
tongue. . . . And says "I know so and so," talking about me, "he's working,
he's dependable, he don't drink . . . I'm going to keep him, and I'm going
to give him fifty cents an hour . . . and then when the cotton season is over
I'm going to give him work to do, and I'm going give him fifty cents an
hour." Mr. Jim Crain says, "I'm going to have to tell you the truth," he
said, "we got a lot of money tied up in that oil mill. And we need Snake
down there to take care of his shift. And you're going to have to give him
all his money. He's going to have to go back to the oil mill."23
At this point in the interview, I asked Snake if he went back to the cotton oil mill.
He said, "I HAD TO. I'm living in Wilson." It was what the company needed. In the end,
what the company needed was more important to the company than what was good for one
of its employees. It probably goes without saying that in this respect race was probably not
the key factor, but it establishes the fact that despite the safety and security, despite the
better conditions, the decision to stay on the Wilson plantation had its price. Within
a year after he was forced back into the cotton oil mill, Snake left Wilson, never to return
. . . not until the summer of 2002. His telling of these events had a certain "rehearsed"
quality to it, as though he had gone over and over them in his mind during the sixty years
since he left Wilson. He had come to terms with his many experiences, still insisted that the
Wilson plantation was a good place to work, that as long as you did your job, Mr. Wilson
took care of you. Snake was not embittered, and only at one point in the interview did his
"tone" take on something of an edge to it. When I asked him "did you go back to the
cotton oil mill." He said "I HAD TO. I was living in Wilson."
Much of this speaks to the kind of man Snake was - and is - and how he
maneuvered the system he lived within. As a child, his nick name, given to him by a white
lady for whom he did odd jobs, was "sunshine." When he moved to Wilson, he was no
longer a child. He was approaching manhood. I asked him how he came to have his new
nickname - Snake - and he said "I was small and dark . . . and I played pool." Rather than
a pool shark, I guess, he was a pool "snake." As he grew into young manhood in Wilson,
he moved through a system that offered him certain opportunities - mostly because he was
good with machinery - but also presented him with a series of challenges and demonstrated
that his opportunities were limited.
In order to make the most of the situation, he used his relationships as best he could
and got as far as he could. When he realized he had gone as far as he could go in Wilson,
he left.
Most African American sharecroppers on the Wilson plantation would not have
been personally acquainted with a member of the Wilson family, although some of them
may have been. They would have been unable to maneuver in the way that Snake Toney
did. But just as Snake ultimately left Wilson for elsewhere, so did most of Wilson's
plantation labor force. In the 1950s, as the transition from mules and men to tractors and
chemicals worked itself out, Wilson brought in truck loads of Mexican laborers to handle
the chopping and picking jobs that still remained. He retooled his cotton gins and built new
ones designed to process the machine picked cotton. Today, the Wilson plantation, like
many others, is almost totally devoid of human habitation. There is no longer any need for
Mexican laborers to chop or pick cotton, and the cotton gins are fully modernized and run
by computers. Some planters, like the Pughs of Ashley County in southeastern Arkansas
no longer rely on local labor to run the cotton gins. For ten years running, Bob Pugh has
used the same crew of Mexican nationals who come to Portland, Arkansas, and run his
cotton gin and then return to Mexico. And cotton is no longer the major crop grown in the
delta. Rice and soybeans have taken their place alongside cotton, and the smell of
chemicals hangs in the air across an almost deserted landscape. The political implications
have been stunning. No longer do delta planters call the shots in the state legislature, and
their influence at the national level is also much reduced. One thing remains the same,
however. The delta continues to be one of the most impoverished places in the country.
A great divide exists between those who own the land and those who have remained in the
delta, eking out some sort of living in the few small factories that some delta towns have
managed to attract.
My original question was did tenants and sharecroppers of any race stand a chance
of sharing the promise of agriculture? Clearly, the answer is no. If they RAN, they could
only find themselves in similar situations. If they STOOD and tried to challenge the system,
planters could use their considerable power in a variety of ways. And, significantly, one
of the ways they demonstrated their muscle was in the way they could utilize their influence
with the federal government. While the Italian government rescued its citizens from
exploitation and peonage, the United States government first abandoned any responsibility
for African Americans immediately following the Civil War, sent federal troops to help
whites quash the black union in Phillips County in 1919, and then funneled the bounty of
New Deal programs to planters in the 1930s. Indeed, government bureaucrats in the
agriculture department rationalized the transformation and depopulation of the rural South
in the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that it was simply inevitable, that the greater concentration
of land ownership, mechanization, and the use of chemicals were all inevitable. Maybe so.
Maybe not. The striking thing, however, was how they dismissed the needs, the hopes, the
desires of tenants and sharecroppers. Essentially, the United States government presided
over an "enclosure" movement similar to that which resulted in the depopulation of the
English countryside in the previous century, a movement that led to serious urban problems
in London and other cities, problems that Charles Dickens made famous in the nineteenth
century. The problems of America's inner cities today are not new and are directly related
to a heartless government attitude that abandoned responsibility for a significant portion
of its population.
NOTES
1. There are several books that cover this transition: Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The
Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1985); Jack Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Gilbert Fite, Cotton Fields No
More: Southern Agriculture, 1865-1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984);
and Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the
Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
2. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences
of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). The best treatment of the law and
sharecroppers and tenants remains Harold Woodman, New South -- New Law: The Legal
Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
3. Helena World, Feb. 23, 1898; Memphis Commercial Appeal March 13, 1903; Forrest
City Times, March 20, 27, May 22, Aug. 28, Oct. 16, 1903; Lee County Courier, Oct. 17,
1903; Modern News, Oct. 17, 1903, Arkansas Gazette, Oct. 18, 1903. See also various
undated newspaper clippings concerning such nightriding activities in the Jacob Treiber
Papers, Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock. For a lengthy discussion of nightriding
in the Arkansas delta, see Jeannie Whayne, A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and
Federal Favor in Twentieth Century Arkansas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1996): 47-55. William F. Holmes wrote a series of articles on nightriding and its
various causes and consequences. See "Labor Agents and the Georgia Exodus, 1899-1900," South Atlantic Quarterly 79 (1980): 436-48; "Moonshiners and Whitecaps in
Alabama, 1893," Alabama Review 34 (Jan. 1981): 31-49; "Moonshining and Collective
Violence: Georgia, 1889-1895," Journal of American History 67 (1980): 588-611;
"Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902-1906," Journal of Southern History
35 (1969): 165-85; "Whitecapping in Georgia: Carroll and Houston Counties, 1893,"
Georgia Historical Quarterly 64 (1980): 388-404; and "Whitecapping in Mississippi:
Agrarian Violence in the Populist Era," Mid-America 55 (1973): 134-48. See also Richard
Maxwell Brown, "The American Vigilante Tradition," in Violence in America: Historical
and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (Beverly
Hills: Sage Publications, 1979): 144-205; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime
and Punishment in the 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984): 260-62;
Ethelred W. Crozier, The White Caps: History of an Organization in Sevier County,
(Sevierville, Tennessee, 1963); Patrick B. Nolan, Vigilantes on the Middle Border: A Study
of Self-Appointed Law Enforcement in the States of the Upper Mississippi from 1840 to
1880 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1987); and Paul J. Vanderwood, Night Riders of
Reelfoot Lake (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1969).
4. For the impact of emancipation and ferment during the reconstruction era see: Eric
Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1983); Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution,
1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Jonathan Wiener, Social Origins of the
New South (Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Leon Litwack, Been in a Storm so
Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); For black poverty, racism, and
disfranchisement, see Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation
Economy After the Civil War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978); Joel
Williamson, Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since
Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); J. Morgan Kousser, The
Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). For institutional
impediments to black advancement see Pete Daniel, Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the
South (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972); and Woodman, New South-New Law,
1995. Even some neo-classical economists find institutional constraints problematic: Roger
Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom.
5. Gavin Wright, Old South New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the
Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion:
Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1977); and William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the
Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1991). For the most extreme expression of this point of
view, see Stephen J. DeCanio, Agriculture in the Post-bellum South: The Economics of
Production and Supply (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974).
6. Wright, Old South New South, p. 12.
7. Ibid., p. 13.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Arkansas
Narratives (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), Vol. 9, Part 4, p.
253.
11. S. Charles Bolton, Arkansas, 1800-1860: Remote and Restless (Fayetteville, Ark.,
1998): 125-144; Ibid., Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 1993); 93-102; Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in
Arkansas (rpt. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Donald McNeilly, Old
South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819-1861
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000).
12. Willard B. Gatewood, "Sunnyside: The Evolution of an Arkansas Plantation, 1840-1945," in Shadows Over Sunnyside: An Arkansas Plantation in Transition, 1830-1945,
edited by Jeannie M. Whayne, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), p. 3.
13. Ibid., p. 13-15.
14. George E. Pozzetta, "Italian Migration: From Sunnyside to the World," in Whayne,
ed., Shadows Over Sunnyside, pp. 95-102; and Ernesto R. Milani, "Peonage at Sunnyside
and the Reaction of the Italian Government," in Whayne, ed., Shadows Over Sunnyside,
pp. 39, 47.
15. For a detailed description of the conditions endured by the Italian tenants, see Mary
Grace Quackenbos, Report to the Attorney General, August 2, 1907, RG 60, 100937,
National Archives, Washington D.C. Quackenbos was the federal investigator sent by the
Attorney General to investigate conditions at Sunnyside. See also Randolph H. Boehm,
"Mary Grace Quackenbos and the Federal Campaign against Peonage," in Whayne, ed.,
Shadows Over Sunnyside, pp. 49-76. For a view more sympathetic to the planters,
particularly Leroy Percy, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Leroy Percy and Sunnyside: Planter
Menatality and Italian Peonage in the Mississippi Delta," in Whayne, ed., Shadows Over
Sunnyside, pp. 77-94.
16. For expansion of the plantation system in Phillips County, see Jeannie M. Whayne,
"Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots,"
Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 58 (Autumn 1999): 294-295; for the tensions between
black and white labor see, ibid, pp. 295-97.
17. For a full treatment of the Elaine Race Riot, see Grif Stockley, Blood in their Eyes:
The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville, 2001). For a pro-planter (and heavily
biased) perspective, see J.W. Butts and Dorothy James, "The Underlying Causes of the
Elaine Riot of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 20 (Spring 1961). See also Walter
White, "'Massacring Whites' in Arkansas," The Nation, December 6, 1919, 715-16; Arthur
I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Connections
between Conflict and Violence (Garden City, 1966); O.A. Rogers, Jr., "The Elaine Race
Riots of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 19 (Summer 1960): 142-50; B. Boren
McCool, Union, Reaction, and Riot: A Biography of a Race Riot (Memphis, 1970);
Richard C. Cortner, A Mob Intent on Death: The NAACP and the Arkansas Riot Cases
(Middletown, TC, 1988); Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, "African American Struggles for
Citizenship in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas in the Age of Jim Crow," Radical
History Review 55 (1993): 33-51; and Carl H. Moneyhon, Arkansas and the New South:
1874-1929 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 107-08.
18. Pete Daniel, Deep'n as it Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (Oxford, 1977; rpt.
Fayetteville, 1999). See also Whayne, A New Plantation South, 146-48.
19. Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, As Rare as Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern
Drought of 1930-1931 (Chicago, 1985); see also Whayne, A New Plantation South, 148-50.
20. There is a substantial literature on the STFU. See H.L. Mitchell, Mean Things
Happening in this Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern
Tenant Farmers Union (Montclair, N.J., 1979); and Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the
Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1971). For treatments of the situation confronting tenants and
sharecroppers in the 1930s with some attention paid to the STFU, see David Eugene
Conrad, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1965); and Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural
Poverty, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). See also Whayne, A New
Plantation South, 157-75.
21. For background on the Lee Wilson plantation, see Jeannie M. Whayne, "Robert E. Lee
Wilson and the Making of a Post Civil War Plantation System," in Randy Finley and
Thomas DeBlack, The Southern Elite and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Willard B.
Gatewood (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001). For William "Snake" Toney,
see Jeannie M. Whayne, interview with William "Snake" Toney, July 6, 2002, St. Louis,
Missouri; and Jeannie M. Whayne, interview with William "Snake" Toney, July 31, 2002,
St. Louis, Missouri.
22. Toney, interview, July 6, 2002.
23. Ibid.
