Background
Owen Whitfield was born in Jamestown, Miss. Little is known of his early life. His parents, former slaves, were sharecroppers.
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Owen Whitfield
Edit ProfileEducation
He returned to Mississippi to attend Okolona College (1911 - 1912), earning money by helping his uncle on a farm.
Career
As a young man, Whitfield worked at various jobs in Tennessee and Arkansas, traveling for a while as a tap dancer in a minstrel show. Whitfield moved to southeastern Missouri in 1923 to sharecrop on a cotton plantation about nine miles from Charleston. He also began preaching about then; by the 1930's he had become pastor of a number of rural churches. In 1937 he joined the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), which had been organized to try to improve the condition of poor croppers and tenant farmers in the South. STFU attacked the inequities of the New Deal's farm program, specifically the failure of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) parity payments to reach croppers. Parity checks were made out to the landlords, who were supposed to share the money with their tenants according to the portion each tenant held in the crop. Many landlords found it easier to evict their croppers and work their land with cheaper day labor. They then could keep the entire check. STFU activity in southeastern Missouri was slow to start. Its efforts in the early 1930's had been focused on eastern Arkansas, where, as in southeastern Missouri, cotton planting was new and the problems seemed worse than in other parts of the South. A charismatic figure who quickly attracted a large following, Whitfield was responsible for organizing the union in southeastern Missouri. Most of the union contacts were made through the churches. "Take your eyes out of the sky, " Whitfield was fond of telling his sharecropper congregation, "because somebody is stealing your bread. " Whitfield did not confine his message to the blacks in his churches; he worked equally hard exhorting the whites in the fields and soon became one of the union's best organizers. His most dramatic effort came in 1939, when he organized a massive roadside protest demonstration in southeastern Missouri. The demonstration was triggered by mass evictions of croppers and tenant farmers at the end of 1938 because landlords wanted to cheat them of their AAA parity checks. Whitfield decided to use the evictions to dramatize the plight of the homeless cropper by camping along the roadside, in the bitter cold, for several weeks in January. It was an early example of a device that came to be common in the South during the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. The publicity from the demonstration won Whitfield an audience with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but beyond that the strike actually did little to change the conditions of the poor farmers in either southeastern Missouri or the nation. More significantly, the demonstration was responsible for exacerbating a growing struggle within STFU, one that ultimately led to its destruction. The problems had started in 1937, when the union joined the CIO and became affiliated with the Communist-dominated United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). Tension grew between the two organizations. It came into the open during the roadside demonstration, when Whitfield turned to UCAPAWA for assistance. Whitfield, who prided himself on his commitment to nonviolence, was not a Communist. "We have a more better and more peaceful way to work out our program and obtain our object, " he wrote, "than resorting to violence. " But his opposition to Communist methods did not cause him to reject Communist support. On this issue he broke with STFU leaders, who were convinced that he was being lured into the Communist camp. Further complicating Whitfield's differences with STFU was the issue of race. He had been apprehensive about the union at first, primarily because he felt it was dominated by whites and would do little to help his people, the majority of whom were black. He changed his mind after talking to STFU officials, and soon became enthusiastic about the potential the union held for improving the lot of tenant farmers, both black and white. Actually, STFU was officially biracial, which made it unique among unions in the South in the 1930's. Moreover, STFU seems to have been innocent of any real racial prejudice. But the Communist faction in UCAPAWA charged that STFU was racist, the work of a "sectarian splinter racket of a few whites. " Whitfield wisely walked a political tightrope between the two factions, seeking what assistance he could get from each. Although the roadside demonstration did not produce radical changes in farm policy, the federal government did build a housing project in the area to help poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers made homeless by evictions. After the demonstration, Whitfield worked for a while in Chicago with Rev. Claude Williams and the People's Applied Religion, but gradually settled back in southeastern Missouri, where he became the minister of several churches in the area. Whitfield died at Cape Girardeau, Mo.
Achievements
Connections
In 1909 he married Zella Brown; they had eleven children.
