“Women Always Had More Courage. . .”: Rural Black Women and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union

Studies on the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), founded in Tyronza, Arkansas in 1934, have done little to center the experiences of its women members. Like men, women suffered from the devastation of the depression years and were among those who were thrown off of the land when plantation owners unfairly took advantage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers subsides to limit planting on their land. When they failed to share their largesse with their labor force, women STFU members organized with their male counterparts to challenge unscrupulous landlords. Their labors represent the long underexplored significance of rural Civil Rights activism among those who were the most underprivileged and dispossessed. It further demonstrates their acute awareness of the times in which they lived and the need to enact much needed change, despite and because of their marginalized status. While such activism was dangerous for any agrarian woman, it was particularly so for African American women who were not only subjected to racial but also sexual violence. This paper will focus on the activism of two African American STFU members, Eliza Nolden and Carrie Dilworth. Both women were agricultural laborers who were deeply involved in the organization. This paper will explore how they understood and utilized the STFU as an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the abuses impoverished rural people and agricultural laborers endured daily. However, it will also productively complicate their stories by assessing how their gender informed their work with the STFU, what their activism cost them personally, and how, at least in Dilworth’s case, it prepared them for later Civil Rights battles.