FALL OF 'KING COTTON' RESULTS IN STRIKE

In the early 1800s, the New Madrid Earthquake caused the formation of 400,000-acres of swampland in Southeast Missouri. Nearly 100 years later, the Little River Drainage Project made the area agriculturally productive, and King Cotton displaced diversified farming only to be deposed after the stock market crash of 1929.

Thus were the origins of the Sharecroppers Demonstration of 1939.

The demonstration was actually a period of several months beginning in January 1939 when thousands of croppers and their families moved their belongings onto public highways. Some of the more than 1,500 demonstrators moved to protest the unfair payment practices and deplorable living conditions they had experienced for many years; others simply had been evicted and had nowhere else to go.

"The reasons for the roadside strike actually began more than 100 years earlier," said Alex Cooper, a Hayti Heights resident who has researched the demonstration and its affects on Southeast Missouri residents. "It began back around 1812 or 1814, when the land was so swampy that people in northern areas, like around Kansas City, called this area "Swampeast Missouri."

Cooper said the southernmost counties of the Bootheel, also called the upper Mississippi Delta region, consisted mainly of swampland prior to a major land drainage product in the early 1900s. As farmland became available, small, diversified farms that grew grains and raised small animals developed.

These farms were displaced when Southern farmers moved to the area between 1910 and 1930 after their crops were destroyed by boll weevils. They brought with them thousands of sharecroppers and tenants who paid rent to landowners using cash and crops.

"The greatest migration took place in the severe winter of 1924, at which time 14,000 people; sharecroppers, tenants and their families, moved with their meager belongings to southeast Missouri," wrote W. Wilder Towle in his book 'Delmo Saga.' "The poor educational opportunity and the economic servitude of the croppers, however, were in no way an improvement over that which they had experienced in their former locations in the southern states."

Cotton became the principal crop in the Bootheel until the market bottomed out in 1929. A federal government subsidy program, the Agricultural Adjustment Program (AAA), was then created to provide economic assistance to landowners, tenants and farmers.

The program was meant to distribute subsidies to planters, who would keep one-fourth of the payment and pass one-fourth to tenants and one-half to sharecroppers/ However, many planters kept a major share of the subsidies by designating tenants and sharecroppers "day laborers", or skilled workers who were not included as recipients of the cotton subsidies.

"That just impacted the whole system in the Bootheel," said Cooper. "The sharecroppers were the main production unit in cotton, and when you could get paid for nonproduction, the leasers had excess money which they didn't pass on to the tenants."

The Rev. Owen Whitfield, a college-educated sharecropper in Mississippi County, was a leading figure throughout the strike. He encouraged croppers to join in a movement to eliminate the plantation system and gain financial independence.

Whitfield worked for two years to organize white and black croppers in the area. His plan was to have croppers leave their properties and live on public highways. There, they would gain a national audience that would see their plight and help improve conditions.

"The demonstrators had been instructed about what to say if questioned," wrote Towle. "Each group had a spokesman and his usual reply to "Why are you here?" was "We had been notified to leave the land and there was no place else to go.""

Whitfield's strategy worked, and numerous state and national individuals and organizations came to the aid of the strikers. About one year after the strike and countless meetings later, the Farm Security Association developed a program to construct 600 low-cost rental homes in 10 villages throughout Southeast Missouri which could be purchased by croppers.

Those villages would eventually become part of the Delmo Housing Corporation.