Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Papers, 1934-1970

Also known as SFTU Papers

Supplements:

• Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union scrapbook and newspaper clippings, 1934-1970
• The Green Rising, 1910-1977 a supplement to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union papers

Format

Microfilm

Location

Library Annex LISA S 3 S64 and S 3 S 65

Arrangement

Main set is organized by manuscript series. The Addendum ("Green Rising") is organized by Collection of personal papers. The clippings files are ordered by date.

Extent

60 reels, plus 17 reels in supplement

Publication

Microfilming Corporation of America (now ProQuest), 1971, 1973

Contents

The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union (STFU) was a bi-racial union of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and small landowners. These documents contain information on the crisis in intellectual labor from the worker's point of view. The deplorable condition of these farmers, the founding and history of the union and its struggle for recognition are covered. The supplement, The Green Rising, features the personal papers and records of four of farm labor's dynamic leaders.

• H.L. Mitchell Papers--The private papers, subject files, and printed materials of STFU co-founder H.L. Mitchell include unpublished and out-of-print studies of Mexican-Americans, and his correspondence documents STFU's Socialist Party origins.
• Clyde Johnson Papers--Documented is the life of Clyde Johnson, a dedicated trade unionist who was the last secretary to the Alabama Sharecroppers Union. Featured is an unpublished thesis by Dale Rosen, which documents the facts surrounding the Reeltown Massacre, as well as Johnson's oral history.
• David S. Burgess Papers--Insight into the lives of migrant workers during the 1940s can be gathered through the papers of David Burgess--a minister who saved the homes of 600 families in the Delmo Labor Homes Project of Southeast Missouri. In later years, Burgess was a CIO organizer and head of the Georgia CIO.
• Thomas H. Gibbons Papers--Gibbons' unpublished "Autobiography of a Technocrat" is based on the author's experiences as a migrant worker and his beliefs in radical economic theory.

The STFU Union Scrapbook and Newspaper Clippings is a collection of news stories about the Union and its successor organizations (the National Farm Labor Union, AFL; the National Agricultural Workers Union, AFL-CIO; and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union Local 300 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters) for the years 1934-1973. The original articles are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
 

While material from this collection has been digitized in various archives, there is not one online location for the entire collection,.