Roll the Union On: Interracial Organizing in Missouri

Abstract

In Memphis, political boss E. H. Crump ruled with a repressive iron hand. Yet the police largely left the Southern Tenant Farmers Union office on Broad Street alone as long as it did not organize in the city (although the police took in H. L. Mitchell for questioning during the 1936 strike). The Hanrahan Bridge across the Mississippi River from Arkansas to Memphis functioned as a gateway to relative safety for many terrorized STFU members. “Union headquarters in Memphis are crowded with refugees from Arkansas,” according to the Sharecroppers Voice. Eliza Nolden (who would die from the beating she received in Arkansas) and the wife of Frank Weems and her eight children (who would later take sanctuary in Mississippi) all took refuge in a two-room shotgun shack with Rev. A. B. Brookins and his wife. Writing that he was still a “Socialist From My hart” at age 70, Brookins pleaded with Mitchell to put him back into Arkansas, where officers of the law had beaten and imprisoned him for 45 days and vigilantes had shot bullets through his home, grazing the hair of one of his children. Mitchell wrote to Brookins, “We have to use only the people who can do the work in the field that is needed and younger men who can dodge planters and don’t mind going to jail… I think too much of you to send you out in bad places.”¹

We’re goin’to roll, goin’to roll, goin’to roll the union on, Goin’to roll, goin’to roll, goin’to roll the union on!.

—John Handcox