The+Aftermath

=The Aftermath=

In the next few weeks and months after the strike, with help from St. Louis activist Fannie Cook, students from Lincoln University, and other concerned citizens, the evicted sharecroppers collected enough funds to purchase 93 acres near Poplar Bluff.

Cropperville, as the settlement was known, was an integrated farming community where former sharecroppers, 80 blacks and 15 whites, cooperatively farmed the land. Although Cropperville residents faced prejudice and oppression from the surrounding white community and many died to sickness and starvation, their success eventually prompted the FSA to create the Delmo Homes, ten Bootheel communities for displaced sharecroppers, including those in Wardell and Gobler.

Although Cropperville was relatively short-lived and many evicted sharecroppers never recovered financially or emotionally, the highway protest of January 1939 proved that courageous individuals, in the face of oppression and in the midst of extreme poverty, could change the course of their lives and bring national attention to the injustice of their plight.

The sharecroppers of the Bootheel, huddled along Highway 60 in the frigid cold, had a vision that their lives could be better and staged a peaceful protest to make that vision a reality. “What happened in the Bootheel was in many ways repeated in Memphis with the sanitation workers, but this was 30 years earlier. There was no civil rights movement. There was no Martin Luther King,” says Steven Ross, director of a documentary about the film. “It’s amazing that it’s such a forgotten piece of history.”

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[|Cropperville] [|Lincoln University]