The Gospel of the Working Class

Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America

Erik S. Gellman, Jarod Roll

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780252093333
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War.

Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

1. Southern Strivings

This story begins in Egypt, a tiny trading town in northeast Mississippi. There, in the heart of Dixie, Owen Whitfield often spent his summer nights in 1910. Sitting at a makeshift poker table in the back room of a pool hall, Whitfield, although not yet twenty years old, possessed a sharp mind, quick wit, and cockiness beyond his racial station. Like other African Americans in the South in the early twentieth century, he felt the influence of Jim Crow in nearly every aspect of his life.¹ What Whitfield, the son of sharecroppers, remembered most from these years was his parents’ bid, through their labor, to achieve some independence from the white Mississippians who employed them. The Whitfields wanted their own farm. Yet even such seemingly modest aims provoked the rage of whites, who preferred to keep blacks desperate and dependent as growers of other people’s cotton. For thousands of African Americans like Whitfield, this system of Jim Crow was like playing a hand of poker dealt from a stacked deck, but with even less chance of winning.²

Owen Whitfield had ambitions beyond a subservient existence. He was like a lot of country boys who came to towns like Egypt to drink corn liquor, smoke cheap cigars, and gamble for coins. There was a place in Jim Crow society for these excitements, so long as African Americans did not contest their lack of citizenship rights. Whitfield, however, grew restless with such rudimentary privileges. He was keen for the kind of autonomy that might create a bit of space for him to apply his talents, particularly his gift for powerful speech. The young Whitfield worked variously as a farmer, a gravedigger, a coal heaver, a lumber sawyer, and a tap dancer. His search both confirmed and tested the boundaries of Jim Crow. Despite the stacked deck, Owen Whitfield continued to gamble against the fate that white people prescribed, because to accept a losing hand was to accept day-to-day survival, bare and raw.

I

We do not know the year of Owen Whitfield’s birth. The reason for this absence is as simple as it is evocative. The state of Mississippi did not care much about the births or deaths of African Americans. It issued no birth certificate for Owen Whitfield, nor did it add his name to any register of births. Relegated to second-class citizenship, at best, African Americans lived, worked, and died in 1890s Mississippi without official recognition of their humanity. Since he could not say for sure what year he was born, Whitfield and others guessed: his registration for the World War I draft cited 1892; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later claimed 1894; his obituaries listed both.³

If the year slipped the family memory, the day of October 14 stuck.⁴ Whitfield arrived on the Eagle Nest plantation near the town of Aberdeen in Monroe County in the middle of the cotton-picking season—a mixed blessing for his parents. His mother, Jane, must have been doubly relieved to have a healthy baby boy after carrying the child through a Mississippi summer. The addition was to be celebrated, for this new mouth to feed would in time provide additional field labor for their family. They named the boy Owen after his paternal grandfather, who was born enslaved in South Carolina in the early 1840s.⁵ But his birth also complicated the immediate work of bringing in the year’s crop, upon which hung the family’s survival. Few sharecropping women could escape field labor, even when pregnant, especially at harvest time. To make matters worse, whether it was 1892 or 1894, the economic depression of the early 1890s deflated the price of cotton. The Whitfields needed to pick all of the cotton they could, as fast as they could, in order to get the best price possible. A pregnancy in these circumstances was dangerous. Given the lack of adequate medical care for sharecroppers, any complication during the birth threatened the lives of both mother and baby. At best, Jane Whitfield would have had only a few days to recover from the delivery before she had to hoist her cotton sack and go back into the fields.⁶

That Jane Whitfield’s maiden name has been forgotten offers poignant testimony to the particular difficulties black women endured in the rural South. However much black families prized the Victorian ideal of the home as the woman’s sphere, few could afford the privilege. The labor of black women was double; they had to work in the field to produce crops and work to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers. Such constant work took a terrible toll. By 1907 Owen’s mother was dead.⁷

Thomas and Jane Whitfield had not always worked as sharecroppers; both had been born in the 1860s to freedpeople in Monroe County at the beginning of Reconstruction. After the Civil War, the federal government passed, and the states ratified, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which provided African Americans with civil rights, including voting rights for men. At the local level, blacks painstakingly secured these rights in practice through political mobilization. Between 1868 and 1874, African Americans in Monroe County elected freedpeople to as many as two-thirds of all county offices. One legacy of that representation was a proliferation of black schools for children like Owen Whitfield’s parents.⁸

Yet, by the 1890s Mississippi had become one of the most pernicious places for African Americans. White Democrats across the South reclaimed political dominance in the 1870s through coercion, fraud, and terror. The violence of these attacks marked the earliest memories of the new, postslavery generation. The Ku Klux Klan, at the forefront of white resistance, burned twenty-six black schools in Monroe County in the first half of 1871 alone.⁹ These violent acts increasingly limited opportunities for an independent economic and social existence for young African Americans like Whitfield’s parents and portended bleaker conditions to come. The white counterrevolution culminated in Mississippi’s 1890 state constitution, which established the legal framework for the disenfranchisement and segregation of African Americans and enshrined white supremacy as the governing rationale of the state. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890,” future Governor James K. Vardaman admitted in 1900, “was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.”¹⁰

With their dreams of political freedom crushed by state repression, sharecroppers like Thomas and Jane Whitfield, who had married in 1885, hoped to secure a modicum of economic independence as farmers. Many African Americans did not see a contradiction between their hopes for full freedom and a future life defined by living and working on the land, so long as they owned that land. Owen Whitfield was thus born into a family who worked hard on a plantation in order to escape it to a farm of their own.¹¹

The hills of eastern Monroe County offered a decent opportunity for aspiring black farmers. Thousands of black Mississippians acquired small plots on the wooded, marginal soils in the state’s eastern and central hill country. Although not rich, these farms afforded limited autonomy. Black owners could raise their own food, largely escape credit and debt, and avoid being supervised by whites. By 1900, 360 black families had acquired land in Monroe County. Owen Whitfield’s family desired their own “little piece of land on Nigger Hill,” he later recalled, which referenced the common name affixed to these isolated pockets of black settlement.¹²

The Whitfields aimed to raise the capital to make a land purchase by sharecropping on white-owned plantations in the fecund Black Prairie of western Monroe County. There, fifteen miles and a world away from the hills, sharecropping families contracted annually a plot of land, usually forty acres, and in return received housing and half of the crop from the owner. Croppers bought their provisions from local merchants—often on credit, since cash was scarce except at harvest time. They usually had to give their creditor a lien on the next year’s harvest, which gave whites control over the planting, cultivation, marketing, and sale of the crop. Sharecropping was certainly never a lucrative arrangement, because bad crops or unscrupulous merchants or landlords could lead to deep debt. But if a family got lucky with the weather, with their health, and with an honest landlord, they could come out ahead when accounts were settled in the autumn. If they did that and supplemented these earnings by working for wages on other farms in the peak weeding and picking seasons, they could accumulate a little cash from year to year.¹³

As the depression of the 1890s waned, the Whitfields found new opportunities in Monroe County. The recent development of the Yazoo Delta in western Mississippi had attracted workers statewide, leaving many places with labor shortages. The Whitfields took advantage and earned supplemental wages in Aberdeen, the county’s main town. Thomas Whitfield cut logs for fence posts, performed garden and yard work for white families, and, on weekends, sold fish that he had caught in the Tombigbee River. Jane Whitfield, meanwhile, washed and ironed white peoples’ clothes. As with work in the fields, Owen Whitfield and his siblings regularly joined in these labors to support the family’s effort to earn their way to independence.¹⁴

All the while the Whitfields conscientiously avoided doing anything that might discomfit their white employers. The 1890s was a decade of intense racial violence directed particularly at those blacks who defied Jim Crow, whether economically or socially. Between 1888 and 1904 more than 230 black Mississippians died at the hands of white lynch mobs, who routinely tortured their victims in spectacle-style killings.¹⁵ Lynching had wide political support. “If it is necessary,” Governor Vardaman declared in 1907, “every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”¹⁶ Given this context, the Whitfields masked their anger at the daily humiliations of Jim Crow. If the “white man give you any of his shit,” Thomas Whitfield told his sons, “you humors him.” “Never act like you knows anything or got any sense,” he told them, “and you’ll come out intack.”¹⁷

Yet, behind the veil of obedience, Whitfield’s parents offered different explanations for their fundamental lack of physical security.¹⁸ Owen’s mother drew her understanding and endurance from Christian teaching that recognized the Devil in the injustices of white supremacy. As the “main pillars” of their churches, rural women like her also served as “spiritual mothers” for their families and communities. Although men dominated in the pulpits, they were a minority in the pews. Thomas, like other black men, was sure that the unfairness of Jim Crow society came down to simple human viciousness. While Jane prayed for divine protection, Thomas looked for ways to outsmart his white neighbors.¹⁹

Because of their deference and industriousness, the Whitfields gained a reputation among local whites for being “good working niggers.” “Nobody,” Owen Whitfield recalled, “could say nothing against old Tom and his boys.” Such understandings, however degrading, not only kept black families relatively safe but could also help facilitate buying and, more importantly, keeping property. The Whitfields used part of their earnings to purchase a mule and a wagon, important acquisitions that represented a substantial investment for sharecroppers. A team and wagon could enhance a family’s immediate earning potential and would certainly be vital to the long-term success of any independent farm.²⁰

Thomas Whitfield’s fishing prowess exemplified the family’s careful balancing act between ambition and caution. Each day after working in the fields, he would load his wagon with tackle, poles, and trotlines and venture to his favorite fishing holes along the banks of the Tombigbee, where he would store the crappie, largemouth bass, and catfish that he caught in a hidden live box. Every Saturday, Thomas and Jane would take the wagon to fetch out the week’s catch. In order to ensure that these privileges continued, however, they would first stop at the constable’s house to offer him the best fish and then proceed to their usual street corner in Aberdeen to sell the rest. At the end of the day, Thomas would make a final stop at Ike Puckett’s to buy a jug of moonshine and then retire to the nearby woods. He would then often make a drunken appearance in town to the general entertainment of Aberdeen’s whites. Southern whites were more likely to accept blacks making money if they spent it on liquor, or other harmless amusements, and played the stereotypical black fool. Thomas was by all accounts liberal with drink, but his public displays were, as his son later reckoned, also carefully designed to disarm white unease about his profitable fish mongering.²¹

Sometimes, however, the actor could stumble. In late 1903, after making his usual Saturday trip into the woods, Thomas Whitfield lost control of his mules on his way back into Aberdeen. His wagon scraped the side of a local planter’s new buggy. While such an offense could lead to death at the hands of a mob, the constable who enjoyed the Whitfields’ fish noted Thomas’s usual “friendly” behavior to calm gathering tempers. Thomas Whitfield still faced a fine and the payment of damages, and local white opinion of him soured in the weeks that followed. In the new century, Mississippi whites became less and less willing to tolerate petty entrepreneurs like the Whitfields. To reflect this, the state passed a new Vagrancy Act in 1904 that required African Americans to prove their employment, which in practice required the good word of a white person, or face imprisonment. This law gave white employers another powerful instrument to control black workers.²²

In the wake of the mishap, Thomas convinced Jane that it was time to leave Aberdeen. Having heard rumors in early 1904 of new farming opportunities across the Mississippi River, the Whitfields left the county of their kin since slavery and moved to a farm outside Harrisburg in Poinsett County, Arkansas.²³ There in the Arkansas lowlands, the Whitfields entered a rough and chaotic agricultural frontier. The counties that bordered the Mississippi River across from Memphis and the Yazoo Delta remained swamped woodlands until the end of the nineteenth century, when the rapid expansion of timber cutting, railroad building, and drainage work opened a burgeoning plantation economy. Life in the lowlands was rife with disease, the work was dangerous, and white violence there was as bad as in Mississippi, but the area appealed to many blacks because it promised plenty of wage work and new farming opportunities.²⁴

Now cropping Arkansas cotton, the Whitfields renewed their quest to buy a farm. Although they did well on their first two crops, the availability of land in the wooded hills on nearby Crowley’s Ridge stoked their desire to get away from sharecropping. Lying awake one night in late 1905, Owen overheard his parents discussing the family’s future—such eavesdropping was hard to avoid, since most sharecropper cabins had only two rooms. They were especially worried about getting old without a place to call their own, and Thomas and Jane vowed that night to do all they could to buy some land. Early in 1906 they left the lowlands to rent a small shack on the ridge and focus their efforts on wage work. Thomas Whitfield quit farming altogether to take a job in a local axe handle mill that paid $1.50 a day and an additional 40 cents for bringing young Owen along to work at his side. Owen and his older brother James also earned ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Principal Characters
• Introduction: Brothers in the Fight for Freedom
• 1. Southern Strivings
• 2. Seeking the Kingdom of God
• 3. Prophets in the Storm
• 4. Religion Applied
• Conclusion: Clods of Southern Earth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index