best overall
Story By Mike Overall, Photo By Susan O'Connor

Van Hawkins’ beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Plowing New Ground, tells an amazing story, one whose human machinations sometimes trumped the entrenched evils plied by some who wrote a long and dark chapter in the Delta’s history.

The book records the history of the Great Depression-era Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), headquartered in the Poinsett County town of Tyronza, and its two movers and shakers, H.L. Mitchell and Clay East.

When the country was plunging into the abyss of the worst economic depression in its history, Mitchell’s dry cleaning establishment and East’s service station formed the epicenter of what the locals dubbed “Red Square,” a place where white and black men and women unionized and vented their socialistic wrath at the planter and political establishment that exploited, and often fought, via legal and sometimes violent means, the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who had the temerity to wage a sustained campaign of opposition against those forces whose unabashed Jim Crowism had made them the masters of the dispossessed’s fate.

In July 1934, 11 white men and seven black men joined together under the leadership of the “Red” businessmen to form the STFU. Women also were welcomed into the union, many in leadership roles.

Black and white sharecroppers on the figurative and literal march was incendiary enough for the times. But the addition of women to the union mix made the group a potent force to be reckoned with.

“The union, which was nationally famous in its day but was largely forgotten before Arkansas State opened the museum in Tyronza, was definitely a precursor to what would later be known as the civil rights movement,” Hawkins said in a recent interview. “Tyronza didn’t turn into another Elaine (where, in 1919, unionizaton efforts by black sharecroppers resulted in what the distinguished Arkansas historian Dr. Michael Dougan has called the Phillips County Race Massacre) because whites and blacks of both sexes solidified their relationship. The blacks were not hung out to dry, so to speak.”
The union mattered, Hawkins said, because it wrote an important and courageous chapter in the history of organized labor, of civil rights, of Arkansas and the South.

Van Hawkins, a man of many paradoxes who grew up dirt poor on a hardscrabble sharecropper’s farm south of Cardwell in the Missouri Bootheel, later attended the University of Missouri, where he received his degree in literature and met the woman who would become his wife, Ruth, now Director of Heritage SITES (System Initiatives for Technical and Educational Support) for ASU.

Reared by an uneducated but highly intelligent and gifted father who was abandoned and left to his own devices in rearing a son and making his way in the world, Hawkins has been many things in his life: a poor kid who wasn’t about to be kept down on the farm; an entrepreneur who once made his living operating now-primitive mechanical cotton pickers in the fields of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; a street-smart, sometimes profane newspaperman who edited international news and later wrote art criticism and feature-length stories for a newspaper in the Tidewater country of Virginia; a son who saw his mechanical genius of a father parlay a dirt farm into an agricultural empire of sorts; and a prolific writer of stories that cry out to be told.

Bookish though he is, Hawkins possesses a wry, sometimes earthy sense of humor that borders on the hilarious. He gives little truck to conformity and possesses a newspaperman’s innate disdain for phonies, politicians who are all talk and no action and bureaucrats who live in fear of upsetting the proverbial apple cart.

With the Cold War now history and those who lived through it either dead or growing rather long in the tooth, it may come as a shock today that Tyronza’s “Red Square” leaders were “wild socialists” during a time when sharecroppers and tenant farmers were on the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder, Hawkins said.

Strange as it may seem today, Socialists walked the land openly in those hard times, when the nation’s economy had gone straight to hell in a hand basket. And also conspicuous by their presence then were committed Communists, who, as the novelist William Styron once wrote, were about the only friends the downtrodden blacks had when Jim Crow ruled the South.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says that “after some discussion,” the black-and-white founders of the STFU “decided that the union should be fully integrated, recognizing that they shared similar needs and economic situations. This was a stunning break with the past.”
Union organizers were arrested and beaten. One white organizer was arrested on charges that included calling a black man “Mister.” One of the museum’s best exhibits is a showing of an old “March of Time” newsreel, which were shown in movies theaters in the days before television, about the union and the dangers it faced.

Despite its detractors’ efforts to grind it into oblivion, the STFU’s influence spread far beyond the borders of Poinsett County and Arkansas. and eventually onto the national stage, Hawkins said.

And despite intense hostility and harassment, the union pulled off a successful cotton picker strike in 1935.

Hawkins said the lives of Mitchell, East and their outspoken supporters were probably saved when it was decided to move the union headquarters to Memphis.

The Bluff City’s mayor then was E.H. “Boss” Crump, a political demagogue who nonetheless had no problem with blacks exercising their right to vote. As a result of his concessions to Memphians of color, Crump developed a symbiotic relationship with blacks in his city.

“There was a wealthy clique of socialists in Memphis at the time,” Hawkins said, some of whom were women who placed their physical well being on the line in support of the STFU. “Crump wouldn’t tolerate women being abused and brought all his powers to bear to prevent such violence being perpetrated against his own.”

Plowing New Ground is an amazing piece of work that recounts an incredible story of courage, self-determination, and the power and influence an organization may wield when it’s led by brave men and women with the guts to take on an established and corrupt order.

The SFTU Museum stands as a monument to those who fought tooth and nail to make the American dream a reality in the Arkansas Delta.

Hawkins, who holds an M.A. degree in Heritage Studies from ASU and an M.A. in Pastoral Studies from Loyola University in New Orleans, said all royalties from the sale of his book will go to ASU in its continuing effort to make the museum a living testament to the union and its brave members.

Located at 117 Main Street in Tyronza, the STFU Museum, an Arkansas State University Heritage Site, is located in the historic Mitchell-East building and the former Bank of Tyronza. Hours are Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

It is a place where our common story is told for the benefit of all who share the legacy of what the Southern Tenant Farmers Union accomplished in another world, during a time when, for some, it was dangerous just to dream of a better life for all Americans.