A Different Day Read online

  No precise statistics showing the ratio of white to black members are available, but the majority of LFU locals seem to have consisted of African Americans. The union did make some headway among poor white people in rural Louisiana. White farmer John Moore of Simmesport, for example, led efforts to organize a local in Avoyelles Parish before being attacked and driven from his home by a mob in July 1936. Most of the other local leaders were black, including John B. Richard (who served as vice-president of the state union), Abraham Phillips, and Willie and Irene Scott. The black men and women who joined the union were cotton farmers and sugar workers who welcomed the legal assistance, skills, and resources that organizers brought to the freedom struggle. The grievances that LFU members expressed in letters to the union newspaper and in convention resolutions reflected many long-standing concerns of rural black people, such as unfair crop settlements, inadequate schools, exclusion from decision-making on government policies that affected them, and lack of protection from violence. Joining the LFU signaled their intention to intensify the fight against inequality and injustice.49

  The LFU's first real battle occurred in St. Landry Parish in 1936. For several months the union had been involved in a range of activities there, including forming a farmer-labor cooperative with maritime workers in New Orleans and pressuring state and federal authorities to provide relief to farmers after the region was struck by drought.50 In November, plantation owners in the parish made their first attempt to destroy the union, precipitating a fight that set LFU members against planters and their associates in local office. With the help of federal officials, the LFU gained a partial victory, but the incident showed that the union was far from welcome in Louisiana and that some white people were determined to do everything in their power to prevent it from interfering with the plantation system.

  The struggle began when twenty families on St. Landry Farm learned that they were to be evicted because the bankers who owned the land wanted to sell it to the Resettlement Administration. Local administrators responsible for choosing farmers to participate in the planned resettlement project decided that LFU members would be excluded. Most of those who were told that they would have to leave were African American sharecroppers and belonged to the union. According to former manager Albert de Jean, all of them were good farmers. The families were served eviction notices in late November and ordered to move off the plantation by the end of the next month. As a statement prepared by the LFU pointed out, most rural workers made employment arrangements for the following crop season in July and August. The only landowners likely to have farms available this late in the year were “‘ornery’ landlords” who abused their workers. The St. Landry Farm families did not want to move.51

  Eight union locals joined together to protest the action, demanding that the sharecroppers either be allowed to stay and participate in the resettlement program or be placed on good farms elsewhere with loans to buy their own equipment and supplies. Planters and parish officials responded by intimidating organizers and members. A group of white men that included Sheriff D. J. Doucet harassed Gordon McIntire when he went to collect affidavits from plantation residents in December. At a meeting held in Opelousas, vigilantes threatened McIntire and other union leaders while local resettlement supervisor Louis Fontenot “stood among the hoodlums grinning.” Toward the end of December, the Resettlement Administration sent Mercer G. Evans to investigate the LFU's charges of discrimination. After speaking to local officials, Evans said that he found no evidence of policy violations but suggested that the displaced sharecroppers might receive loans if they found new farms and applied for aid. Under continued pressure from the union, federal administrators finally agreed to loan the evicted families between four and five hundred dollars each to help them establish farms of their own.52

  The LFU achieved similar success in a confrontation with landlords in Pointe Coupee Parish in 1939. Plantation owners had responded to stricter regulations forcing them to share AAA checks with workers by evicting sharecroppers and altering tenancy agreements so that they could keep a bigger proportion of the government subsidies for themselves. Tenant families were told that they must accept the new arrangements or leave. Union officials advised the farmers to stand firm while they lobbied the federal government to intervene. According to local leader Abraham Phillips, “One bad week followed another, for we never knew when the boss would stop bluffing and really put us out in the cold. But we kept building our membership during those anxious days, we appealed to the federal government, and finally won the support of the Farm Security Administration, so that we got better rent contracts for 1939 than we'd ever had before.” The FSA agreed to lease the plantations from the owners and arranged for tenants to pay cash rents of six dollars an acre. The settlement allowed the families to receive their full AAA payments, sell their own cotton, and follow a live-at-home program, offering them a chance to save some money and get out of debt that most had not previously had.53

  The LFU also became involved in efforts to improve conditions for sugar workers. Under the Sugar Act of 1937, growers who wished to take advantage of the AAA subsidy program had to adhere to certain regulations, including the payment of “fair and reasonable” wages. These were to be determined each year by the Department of Agriculture after hearings were held to give planters, processors, and laborers the opportunity to present testimony to government officials.54 In October 1937 hearings to set wages for the coming harvest season were held at Louisiana State University, a segregated venue that prevented African Americans (who made up the majority of sugar workers) from attending. The morning session was taken up with growers who spoke of the poor prices they received for their product, implying that they could not afford to pay cane cutters any more than the current rates (on average, $1.10 per day or 65¢ per ton).55 In the afternoon, Gordon McIntire spoke on behalf of approximately one thousand LFU members whose complaints included inadequate wages, inaccurate weighing of cane, payment in scrip, excessively high prices charged at company stores, and inability to grow their own food. Some of the planters responded by praising the “beautiful paternalism of the old plantation system,” arguing that because workers received free housing, medical care, and other benefits, they did not need higher wages. Others claimed that black people were lazy and wasted all their money on gambling, so it was pointless to pay them more. However, since wage increases seemed inevitable, the growers indicated that they might accept rates of $1.25 per day or 75¢ per ton. After the hearings the LFU urged members to write to Joshua Bernhardt, chief of the AAA's Sugar Section, telling him why they needed higher wages.56 The final wage determination set minimum rates at $1.20 per day for women and $1.50 per day for men, or 75¢ per ton. The regulations prohibited growers from reducing wages “through any subterfuge or device whatsoever” and stated, “the producer shall provide laborers, free of charge, with the perquisites customarily furnished by him, e.g., a habitable house, a suitable garden plot with facilities for its cultivation, pasture for livestock, medical attention, and similar incidentals.”57

  The Department of Agriculture held additional hearings in February 1938 to establish wages and working conditions for the planting and cultivation seasons. Peggy Dallet presented a statement by the LFU describing the miserable poverty that year-round employees on the sugar plantations suffered and calling for minimum wages of $1.20 per day for women workers and $1.50 for men. She refuted planters’ contentions that the provision of free housing and medical care compensated for low pay, saying that in most cases accommodations were not fit for human habitation and sick people paid their own doctors’ bills. Dallet requested that all payments be in cash and that workers be allowed to grow gardens and raise livestock for food. In July the AAA announced its regulations for the coming season, requiring growers to pay women at least $1.00 and men $1.20 per day and to provide the customary perquisites free of charge. Though the new wage determination was not as high as the LFU had hoped, it still represented a 20 percent increase
over previous rates.58

  These wage rates held steady for the next four years.59 Once the rules were established, workers fought to ensure that planters abided by them. The LFU taught its members how to keep records of what they were owed for the labor they performed each day and encouraged them to file complaints against employers who violated the law. Louisiana sugar workers submitted nearly four hundred wage claims to local and federal authorities in August and September 1939. At the request of the LFU, the Department of Agriculture withheld AAA subsidies from plantation owners until the claims were settled, and government agents investigated reports that employers in several parishes had threatened and intimidated their workers. The same year, union members in Pointe Coupee Parish refused to accept wages of one dollar per day from a planter who had evicted some families the previous year for filing complaints. As a result, they reported, he was “forced to live up to the law.”60

  Support for the LFU grew steadily in the late 1930s. Between 1936 and 1938 the number of dues-paying members more than doubled, increasing from 400 to 891. Although this represented only a tiny fraction of the LFU's potential constituency, it was an encouraging start.61 Organizers found the response from African Americans especially gratifying. In November 1939 more than three hundred delegates from locals in twenty-five parishes attended the third annual convention of black members held in Baton Rouge, where they presented reports of their activities and listened to guest speakers from the AAA and FSA informing them of their rights under the federal government's agricultural programs. Gordon McIntire declared that it was “probably the largest meeting of sharecroppers and tenants ever held, but if not I will guarantee that it was the most unified meeting, and surely accomplished more than any that I have ever attended.” The delegates voted to work toward establishing parishwide organizations to coordinate the efforts of their union locals. Moreover, to make it easier for cash-deprived tenant farmers to join the union, they agreed to allow the collection of dues for 1940 after the current year's harvest.62

  Some white observers in Louisiana ridiculed black people's participation in the LFU, arguing that the communists wanted only to manipulate the state's poor, ignorant sharecroppers for their own purposes. One report on the union stated that it was “a trouble making organization in that it puts ideas in the minds of the negro tenant farmers in Louisiana which could not possibly have originated there.” But African Americans were not as easily misled as these analysts believed. Black members saw the union as a powerful ally in their fight against exploitation and discrimination. They did not need to read Karl Marx or be “duped” by communist propaganda to sense the logic in the LFU's initiatives. Union organizers could not have been so successful if their analysis had not accurately described many aspects of rural black people's lives. As the Urban League's monthly newspaper Opportunity pointed out, black tenant farmers in Alabama and Louisiana knew nothing about theories of economic determinism or Marxist philosophy, “But these things they do know. They know of grinding toil at miserably inadequate wages. They know of endless years of debt. They know of two and three months school. They know of forced labor and peonage.”63

  African Americans in rural Louisiana had been battling these evils in their own way before the arrival of union organizers. Membership in the LFU offered the chance to fight their oppressors on more even terms. Writing to the Southern Farm Leader “about the dirty landlords, and how they rob us poor tenants,” one Pointe Coupee activist stated, “When I heard about this union and what it was for, I joined it and I am proud to be a member of the Farmers’ Union and I am willing to help every good effort for our justice and rights.” Another member wrote, “When our Creator brought us into this world, He gave each and every man a right to inherit some of land that He created. I'm looking to the Union to open the door for me.”64 With the power of organization behind them and with the help of sympathetic federal officials, union members gained some limited concessions from plantation owners in the 1930s.

  A key issue that had always concerned rural African Americans was gaining fair settlements at the end of the crop seasons. According to Clyde Johnson, one of the first things sharecroppers and tenants wanted was “a way of having a voice. They wanted their account with the landlord to be on paper.” The LFU taught its members how to keep records of purchases from plantation stores so that they would know if planters tried to cheat them. At the same time, the union lobbied to make the provision of written contracts with employers a standard practice under federal farm programs. Although administrators had always encouraged the use of contracts, they were not compulsory. In 1938 the FSA announced that it would insist on having written leases drawn up between its clients and their landlords, attempting to pacify planters by saying that this was for the protection of both parties. “We know from experience that both profit from having their agreement in written form,” an FSA official stated. Another supervisor explained, “The landlord must be protected against abuse of the land and improvements, abandonment of crops and the like, while the tenant must have assurance of occupancy, a fair division of crop proceeds and renumeration for improvements made.” These statements aside, most of the provisions on the FSA's standard lease form seemed designed to improve conditions for tenants, including minimum requirements for the quality of housing and a guarantee that renters be allowed to follow a live-at-home program.65

  Complementing the campaign for written leases, black people used their union locals to continue the struggle for decent schools. Shortly after his arrival in Louisiana, Clyde Johnson reported: “The Negro people, contrary to the teaching of the landlords, are very hungry for education and culture. Union members are already writing to the state depart[ment] of education explaining that they get only 3 or 4 months schools with very poor fa[cil]ities and insisting that they be given longer and better school terms.” In a resolution calling for resettlement loans for the evicted sharecroppers of St. Landry Farm, LFU Local 2 also demanded “better equipped school houses and free text books, longer school terms, higher salaries for Negro teachers, and free transportation for Negro children.” A few months later the Southern Farm Leader reported that a group of union women in the parish had successfully lobbied for improvements at their children's school. The women raised $15.50 for the purpose themselves, then sent a delegation to request more aid from parish officials, who agreed to match the amount. The money was used to install new toilets, new steps, and a fence to enclose the school grounds.66

  Union members in other communities carried out similar activities, often making education a top priority. In 1937 the secretary of a newly established local reported, “Our first demand is for a school bus, some of the children have as much as 5 miles to walk.” The following year, when the LFU endorsed the Harrison-Fletcher Bill providing for federal aid to education, one member told Gordon McIntire, “I saw in the Bulletin where you said you had been to Washington to get aid for rural schools. To my judgement that is one of the most important things you could have done for us especially in West Feliciana Parish. . . . I can see and understand that you are on the job and I pray that you and all others keep working for improvement.”67

  The LFU also attempted to give members a voice in the administration of federal farm policies. In 1937 Gordon McIntire represented the union at hearings held by the President's Committee on Farm Tenancy in Dallas, Texas. He joined three representatives of the STFU in urging the federal government to allocate more money to its rural rehabilitation programs so that assistance could be given to the thousands of farm families who needed it. A common complaint among rural poor people was that agents of the federal government's Agricultural Extension Service often failed to address the needs of small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. “County agents are chosen by the landlords to be of service to the landlords,” an article in the Southern Farm Leader explained. “Its hard for a square dealing County Agent who wants to be of service to share cropers and tenants and small farmers, to keep his job. He is soon fired by the land
lords.” The newspaper encouraged readers to demand that county agents be elected by white and black farmers and farmworkers so that they might be more responsive to the needs of the majority of rural people instead of serving the narrow interests of plantation owners. Administrators of federal loan programs also came under attack for discriminating against African Americans and LFU members. Union leaders urged members to write to the heads of government agencies and their representatives in Congress to ask that administration of the programs be placed in the hands of committees elected by all the farmers in the areas they served.68

  These efforts to democratize federal agricultural policy and increase black people's political influence were largely unsuccessful.69 At the local level, however, union agitation gained access to New Deal programs for black farmers who otherwise would have been excluded. A measure of the LFU's achievement in this area is that in Pointe Coupee Parish, where the union had many strong locals, more than 80 percent of FSA clients in 1937 were black.70 Union leaders disseminated information about federal loans that were available and helped members to complete the application process. Black farmers who encountered discrimination from local officials could call on the LFU to assist them in gaining fair treatment. Abraham Phillips, for instance, was repeatedly turned down for an FSA loan by his parish committee because of his “general reputation as a trouble maker and a busy body” (a reference to his union organizing activity). The LFU's persistent appeals on his behalf caused the committee members to relent in January 1942. They finally approved Phillips's application in an attempt to “harmonize the labor situation” in Pointe Coupee.71