Mean Things

For years, H. L. Mitchell worked at the center of the farm labor movement. In the early 1930s Mitchell earned a local reputation by collaborating with the Tennessee Socialist party in an investigation of sharecroppers and by organizing a union of unemployed workers in his native Arkansas. When local sharecroppers decided to form a union they turned to him for assistance, and Mitchell became the executive secretary of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), an organization soon to be nationally influential. Union activity petered out during World War II, but after 1945 Mitchell continued to serve the union, now renamed the National Farm Laborers’ Union (NFLU), and in 1952 he helped organize a famous strike against the DiGio...