This weekend we traveled to Tyronza, Arkansas for a repeat visit to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union Museum. The Union was organized in Tyronza in 1934 by what on the surface would seem an odd couple in the deep south: Clay East who operated a gas station and H.L. Mitchell, owner of a dry cleaning establishment. Mitchell was the early convert to Socialism and East soon followed. The Tyronza Socialist Party was the first in the state and one of the first in the South.
The businesses were smack in the middle of sharecropper and tenant farming land. The two men became the local “outside agitators” for a union that would support strikes against landowners in order to increase wages for the growers and pickers of cotton. From the beginning the Union was an integrated affair. The incorporation meeting of 1934 included seven Black men and eleven whites.
The little area in front of the businesses of the two founders became known as Red Square. Norman Thomas spoke there. Strikes followed and wages went up. Word spread. So did the Union. The time was ripe. Membership grew and eventually the Union moved to Memphis Tennessee and soon offices opened across the country.
Waiting For Charlemagne 