SHARECROPPERS' FIGHT SUBJECT OF DOCUMENTARY

An award-winning documentary about the 1939 roadside protest by Missouri Bootheel sharecroppers will be screened Wednesday night in Sikeston.

The showing of "Oh Freedom After While," from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Sikeston Public Library, will open the annual convention of the Missouri Folklore Society, which will continue through Oct. 30.

The documentary about an uprising of sharecroppers to protest unfair treatment and poor wages fits in well with the Folklore Society's objective of promoting folk heritage, said Clyde Faries, co-president with his wife, Liz, of the Missouri Folklore Society.

"Most historians focus on the powerful, those with high status, the generals, politicians and literati. But folklore is of, by and for the common people, and I think that's where the truth is to be found," Faries said.

The documentary, which was finished in April, shows that common people, when they come together, can be a voice in change.

In January 1939, more than 1,000 sharecroppers walked out of the fields and onto Highways 60 and 61 near Sikeston to protest a loophole in a farm policy that paid land owners to take land out of production without compensating the sharecroppers put out of work, said Candace O'Connor, a St. Louis free-lance writer who was a co-producer and scriptwriter for the documentary.

The system under which sharecroppers worked was already unfair in that the small percentage they earned from each crop was consumed by the rent, food and clothing they had to buy from the owner of the land, said Lynn Rubright, an education professor at Webster University in St. Louis and the other co-producer of the documentary.

The documentary, directed by Steven Ross, focuses on Owen Whitfield, a black preacher and organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, who helped lead the sharecropper protest.

"What was amazing was that black and white sharecroppers came together for the walk-out," Faries said. "At that time, law and tradition separated the races."

But together, these sharecroppers shut down the highways and attracted national attention.

"The newsreel folks and photographers from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and even The New York Times came to take pictures," O'Connor said. "It was quite an embarrassment for the state government."

After five days, the state of Missouri declared the area where the sharecroppers were camping on the roads a health hazard and trucked them away.

"But the places where they dumped them were worse than the roadside," O'Connor said. "They just wanted them out of public view."

After that, some of the sharecroppers found work on other farms, some migrated to large cities, some, mostly black but some whites, even founded their own community, Cropperville near Poplar Bluff, O'Connor said.

The protest also brought attention to farm policy and helped get the federal government more interested in protecting the rights of sharecroppers.

"This served as a stepping stone on their way to independence," O'Connor said. "They were no longer beholden to a plantation owner. The protest enabled them to look beyond to a better life."

Prior to the showing of the documentary, area residents can participate in "The Bootheel Revisited" and "The Bootheel Remembered" from 1 to 4 p.m. a the Sikeston Public Library to review ways and days of Bootheel life.

The remainder of events for the Missouri Folklore Society convention will be held at the Sikeston Ramada Inn. They include folk music and dancing, including a "stomp" dance led by native American Brick Autry, at 7 p.m. Thursday; a cotton-picking contest at 3:30 p.m. Friday; folk music and an auction at 7 p.m. Friday.

Convention sessions will be held throughout the day on Friday and will include presentations on roustabouts, bushwhackers, graveyard theater, drop-spindle spinning, jazz and the oral tradition, Missouri fiddlers, Big Oak Tree State Park, early animal hospitals and old North St. Louis. Saturday morning sessions offer programs on the Trail of Tears, event-based folk songs and other music.

Fee for attending the convention is $15, though there is no charge to attend individual events or sessions.