The+Strike+of+1939

=The Strike of 1939=

In response to the plight of the evicted sharecroppers, Owen Whitfield, a charismatic preacher who traveled the Bootheel speaking to various congregations, secretly planned a massive protest that he hoped would force Missouri to face the problem and bring national attention to the Bootheel.

In January 1939, Whitfield led over 1,700 evicted sharecroppers, including hundreds from Tin Town, a community just outside of Caruthersville, to the roadsides of Highways 60 and 61 between Hayti and Sikeston.

“If we are going to starve, let’s starve together,” Whitfield told sharecroppers. “If we’re going to starve, let’s starve out there. If we’re going to starve, let’s starve where people can see us.”



Entire families, including women and children, set up camp along the highways in the frigid and harsh winter weather, sleeping in tattered tents or in the backs of wagons. Calling the protest “a man-made disaster,” the American Red Cross refused to help.

News of the event spread across the nation, with page one coverage and even mention of the protest in the March of Time newsreels. The protest was especially remarkable given the racial atmosphere of the segregated South, as blacks and whites huddled together in masses along the roadsides, raising their collective voice in protest against their appalling conditions. “They couldn’t understand—how could there be blacks and whites working together,” says historian Kremer.

The national attention to the protest embarrassed Missouri governor Lloyd Stark, who, one week after it began, sent in the National Guard to break up the demonstration. Protesters were forced into what some called “concentration camps” behind the levee at church yards, and other places far removed from the highways and the public eye.

Read more of the story:

//[|Oh Freedom After While]//

[|"Homeless, Homeless We Are" by Steve Mitchell]

[|Center for Regional History (Southeast Missouri State University)]