Listed in Arkansas Register of Historic Places on 12/09/94
ELABORATION
This structure is being nominated to the Arkansas Register of Historic Places for its association with H.L. Mitchell and Clay East, two of the principal founders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Mitchell was born in Halls, Tennessee, in 1905 and had worked at various jobs, including sharecropping, before moving to Tyronza in 1927 to operate a dry cleaning establishment. Next door to his business, Henry Clay East operated a gas station. Mitchell, who had become a socialist in Tennessee by reading condensed writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and others in the Little Blue Book series, soon convinced East of the merits of socialism. Mitchell recalls in his Mean Things in This Land that their end of Main Street was soon known as “Red Square” by the locals.
In 1932, Mitchell and East actively campaigned for the Socialist Party of America platform of Norman Thomas and Jim Maurer for president and vice-president, respectively. Later that year, they drove to Memphis to hear Thomas speak and afterwards decided to form a Socialist Party local in Tyronza. Seven people were required for the charter, but East initially declined as he had decided to run for township constable as a Democrat in order to provide legal protection for the fledgling organization. East was elected to a two-year term. In 1933, Mitchell and East served as delegates to the Continental Congress of Farmers and Workers, a national meeting of representatives from the Socialist Party of America, the Railway Labor Unions, and the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of America. Much of the platform adopted by the congress was eventually incorporated into Roosevelt's New Deal, including minimum wage law, old age and survivor's insurance, public housing, farm relief, and a guarantee of the right of industrial workers to organize and bargain collectively.
In the 1933 election, Mitchell ran as a Socialist Party candidate for state representative while East ran as the party candidate for county sheriff. A few days before the election their names were removed from the ballot on a technicality, namely that the Socialist Party had failed to file a pledge to abide by the Arkansas Anti-Corrupt Practices Law. Mitchell and East had never heard of such law, and the Socialist Party boycotted the elections held at Tyronza, Trumann, and Marked Tree and encouraged people to vote in a mock election instead. After the votes were tabulated, it was discovered that more people voted in the Socialist election than in the general election.
In 1934, Norman Thomas visited Arkansas and met with Mitchell and East. Over lunch at East's house, Thomas applauded their efforts to further the Socialist Party in Eastern Arkansas, but suggested that what was really needed in this area was a sharecropper's organization to fight for the rights of those being evicted and unfairly treated under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. In short, this act ordered farmers to plow under one-third of the cotton crop under the basic market theory that less cotton would command higher prices. The farmers were compensated for their loss by “parity” payments from the government. Unfortunately, according to Mitchell, this program wrecked the lives of nearly one million already desperate sharecroppers in the south. Many were evicted because their labor was no longer needed. Moreover, many of the landowners failed to disburse payments to the tenant farmers as required under the act.
On July 13, 1934, eleven white and seven black men met at the Sunnyside School near Tyronza and formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, the name for the organization having been coined by Charles “Uncle Charlie” McCoy of Trumann. Integrated at a time when no other institution was, the association membership grew to a peak of an estimated 31,000 members in 1937. For a time, it seemed that the union might achieve great success. In 1935, the union staged a cotton pickers’ strike of some 5,000 workers that was successful in gaining a wage increase of fifty percent. A similar cotton chopper’ strike the following year failed due to both intimidation by the plantation owners and by the hot weather which inhibited weed growth.
During the first two years of the union's existence, its members met violent opposition from the planters and their riding bosses. The Rev. J. Abner Sage, an unofficial spokesman for the plantation owner's interests, formed a vigilante group known as the "Nightriders" to intimidate, terrorize, and lynch STFU members. H.L. Mitchell, who was serving at this time as executive secretary of the union, was one of the first forced to leave. He left Tyronza ahead of the mob and moved to Memphis in 1935. His union records, correspondence, and library were left in the back room of the dry cleaning shop and were confiscated by the Poinsett County sheriff and never returned.
Clay East had limited his involvement with the union after a close encounter with a mob in Marked Tree in the same year. East resigned as president of the union in 1935 and left Tyronza. A year later, he helped transport a Little Rock lawyer to defend a union organizer in jail at Forrest City. After a mob tried to lynch him on the courthouse square, a pair of sympathetic highway patrolmen escorted him to Memphis at high speed, an incident which, like others involving the union, created front page news in the regional newspapers. Clay East and his wife moved to Arizona where he operated gas stations and grocery stores until retirement in the early 1970s. A lifelong socialist, East helped organize a union in the International Machinists Association while working in an aircraft plant near Phoenix during World War II.
H.L. Mitchell remained with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union throughout its checkered history. Among his accomplishments were the creation of the President's Committee on Farm Tenancy in 1936.
Although the condition of the original facade behind the cypress siding is not known, the building would certainly be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic places (most probably with national significance) if restored to its 1927 appearance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Serrin, William. "Little-Known Tenant Farmers' Union Will Recall Its Bold Past At Reunion." New York Times. September, 1988.
Mitchell, H.L. Mean Things Happening in This Land. Montclair, New Jersey: Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 1979.
Thompson, Robert F. “The Strange Case of Paul D. Peacher, Twentieth Century Slaveholder.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. LII, No. 4, Winter 1993.