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SA CURD: SB Cotton pickers strike fails, Street meeting et aight near : “pit’s @ herd get-by. The land's just tit tar té hold the ‘ + the end. 4 _ . ; world together.’ . CHAREGROPPERS AL th samember. when the Yoakeos come through, ¢ whale” " passel of, ‘am, hollarin’, and told the Negroas you're free." WATIVE STOCK STRUGGLING 10 | b, Here in this great land with its bright promise for the future, there is a corner where hides all that is dark, dwarfed and misshapen in our civiliza- tion. Away from the beaten track, hidden from all save those possessed of the coyrage to face the truth, 9,000,000 Americans of the Sharecropper Country live in a state of political and economic seridom. They are the victims of a system which has brought low all who live by it—tenants and landlords, laborers and managers, sharecroppers and plantation owners. Those condemned to live in misery and those doomed to live off the miser- able. Starved diseased livgs, illiteracy, twisted minds which are the soil of fascism—these are the bitter fruits of the Sharecropper Country. These people are the stepchildren of our de- mocrac. Their crime—they are guilty of having inherited a soil impoverished by generations of thriftless cash-crop cultivation. Their punishment— they are caught in the toils of an antiquated sys- AR es Sore Lae tem of landholding which creates virtual political and economic serfs out of its toilers. Men and women of native stock do not willingly live in despair. In 1934 a small group of share- croppers met near Marked Tree, Arkansas. There they denounced their serfdom and issued a Program of Action looking toward their political and eco- nomic emancipation. For the building of their new lives they joined together—Negro and white—in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Those who lived off a people in chains and did not see that they themsclves were thereby slaves, fought against this new ¢ jiancipation proclamation, Vhey fought with he a-eold weapons of evictions from the land, chacvegaas. meh vrolence and fyneh- wigs. They sought to rect thea old chats wpa 9,000,0G0 Anierico ns je cess: dot anes vison of a life of freedom and st urat.. ¥. Once fren have seen that vision, it does not die. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union has grown. The men and women who made it are struggling to reestablish their dignity as human beings and to ensure a decent livelihood through a democratic program of minimum wages, soil conservation pro- jects, adequate rural housing, abolition of the poll tax, and anti-lynching legislation. They ask to be admitted to a share in the ordering of their lives through a government in which they will have a voice and a vote. We are all equally guilty, so long as these Amer- iwans five in larkness and despair. Th.y are a part of Anierica, . part for whose fate we share a heavy irspons-biits While they strugel: courageously agains gia odds to achieve for ‘lumselves and thers cali ce @ stake in our dew = acy, Tilky RE iv oP OROOTTEN, eta vo wh A STAKE IN DEMOCRACY |