Before there was SNCC there was the SCU lead for a time by Eula Gray a name largely unknown to Black or white people and there was Ralph Gray Clifford James Share Croppers Union Robin D. G. Kelley A predominantly black underground organization of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers, the Share Croppers Union (SCU) was the largest Communist-led mass organization in the Deep South. Founded in Alabama in the spring of 1931, the organization was first initiated by black tenant farmers in Tallapoosa County. Ralph and Tommy Gray gathered together a small group of black tenant farmers and sharecroppers and requested assistance from the Communist Party in Birmingham. Mack Coad, an illiterate black steelworker originally from Charleston, South Carolina, was dispatched from Birmingham on behalf of the Communist Party and became the first secretary of the Croppers and Farm Workers Union. Based mainly in Tallapoosa and Lee counties, Alabama, under Coads leadership the union built up an estimated membership of eight hundred within a two-month period. In July 1931, the union faced its first in a series of violent confrontations with local authorities. A shootout between union members and the local sheriff at Camp Hill, Alabama, left Ralph Gray dead and forced many union and non-union tenant farmers into hiding. Mack Coad was forced to flee Alabama for the time being, but the union regrouped under the leadership of Young Communist League activist Eula Gray, Tommy Grays teenage daughter. Once the union was reconstructed, it adopted the name SCU. By the summer of 1932, the reconstituted SCU claimed six hundred members and a new secretary was appointed. Al Murphy, a black Birmingham Communist originally from McRae, Georgia, transformed the SCU into a secret, underground organization. SCU militants were armed for self-defense and met under the auspices of Bible meetings and sewing clubs. Under Murphys leadership, the union spread into the black belt counties of Alabama and into a few areas on the Georgia-Alabama border. In December 1932, another shootout occurred near Reeltown, Alabama (not far from Camp Hill), which resulted in the deaths of SCU members Clifford James, John McMullen, and Milo Bentley, and the wounding of several others. The confrontation erupted when SCU members tried to resist the seizure of Jamess livestock by local authorities who were acting on behalf of Jamess creditors. Following a wave of arrests and beatings, five SCU members were convicted and jailed for assault with a deadly weapon. Faced with large-scale evictions resulting from New Deal acreage reduction policies, sharecroppers flocked to the union. Its growth was by no means hindered by the gun battle. By June 1933, Murphy claimed nearly two thousand members, and by the fall of 1934 the official figures skyrocketed to eight thousand. Although most of those who joined the union were victims of mass evictions, the SCU led a series of strikes by cotton pickers in Tallapoosa, Montgomery, and Lee counties. Nevertheless by 1934 the SCU had failed to recruit a single white member. The Party attempted to form an all-white Tenants League, but the effort proved to be a dismal failure. Murphy, who left Alabama in the winter of 1934, was replaced by Clyde Johnson (alias Thomas Burke and Al Jackson), a white Communist originally from Minnesota who had had considerable experience as an organizer in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Rome, Georgia. Partially reflecting the new outlook of the Popular Front, Johnson made an effort to bring the SCU out of its underground existence and transform it into a legitimate agricultural labor union. He founded and edited the SCU’s first newspaper, the Union Leader, and created an executive committee that elected Hosie Hart, a black Communist from Tallapoosa County, as president. Johnson attempted to establish a merger with the newly formed, Socialist-led Southern Tenant Farmers Union, but the leadership of the latter, particularly H. L. Mitchell and J. R. Butler, rejected the idea, claiming that the SCU was merely a Communist front. Throughout 1935, despite the unions push for legal status in the black belt, SCU activists faced severe repression during a cotton choppers strike in the spring and a cotton pickers strike between August and September. In Lowndes and Dallas counties, in particular, dozens of strikers were jailed and beaten, and at least six people were killed. In 1936 the SCU, claiming between ten thousand and twelve thousand members, spread into Louisiana and Mississippi. It opened its first public headquarters in New Orleans and, in an attempt to transform the SCU into a trade union, officially abandoned its underground structure. However, the SCU failed to deter the rapid process of proletarianization occurring in the cotton South--a manifestation of mass evictions and the mechanization of agriculture. Johnson continued to make overtures toward the Southern Tenant Farmers Union throughout 1936, but all efforts to combine the two unions failed. Thus, with support from Communist rural experts, particularly Donald Henderson, Johnson chose to liquidate the SCU as an autonomous body. All sharecroppers and tenant farmers were transferred into the ranks of the National Farmers Union, and the SCU’s agricultural wage laborers were told to join the Agricultural Worker’s Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. The latter soon transferred into the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of American in 1937. Failing to solve the problems created by the New Deal and the mechanization of agriculture in the cotton South, the Partys decision to divide the organization by tenure in 1937 marked the end of the SCU. Nevertheless, a few SCU locals in Alabama and Louisiana chose not to affiliate with any other organization and maintained an autonomous existence well into World War II. FURTHER READING Beecher, John. The Share Croppers Union in Alabama. Social Forces 13 (October 1934). Dyson, Lowell K. Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Rosengarten, Theodore. All Gods Dangers. The Life of Nate Shaw. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 02:02:16 +0000