John Handcox and Joe Glazer at the 48th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Memphis, April, 1982. Photo: Evelyn Munro Smith, held by Joe Glazer. Click to enlarge.

According to the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie, John L. Handcox was the "main light, organizer, and songwriter for the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union during its early days." Since then, Handcox's songs have established him as the voice of poor cotton farmers during the great Depression and, according to Pete Seeger, as "one of the most important songwriters of the early 20th Century." In Handcox's songs and poems, we find both the timeless artistic expression of one man and a documentary history of the major issues that drove the unionization of tenant farmers in the South and Southwest during the 1930s. Due to the power of his words and their rhythmic vitality, his writing continues to touch Americans concerned with worker justice.

In these recordings of Handcox's songs, poems, and stories, you will not find a honey-smooth voice. John Handcox's vocals have a bite to them -- just as his lyrics have a bite, a roughness about them. The reality that he speaks of is harsh and hard -- a rough truth that Handcox knew first-hand. His is a pure voice, that of a man who needed to record and comment on the injustice he saw around him in Depression-era rural Arkansas.

Born in Brinkley, Arkansas on February 5, 1904, to a large African-American family, Handcox knew the hard life of a poor cotton farmer early on. His father, the son of slaves, owned animals, tools, and even some land in eastern Arkansas, near -- but not in -- the fertile Delta of the Mississippi River. Handcox joked, "You couldn't even raise a fuss on that land." Even though the earth was poor and they had to raise cotton on other people's property for money, their land ownership gave the family a measure of security that many other farmers of the era did not enjoy. Young John even attended school up to the ninth grade, much longer than many of his peers, and idolized the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. With Dunbar's work in mind, Handcox first began writing his own poetry and songs.

When his father was accidentally crushed to death by a wagon in 1921, Handcox and the rest of his expanding family entered some particularly hard times. They lost their homestead, leaving them no choice but to live and work others' land as tenant farmers. During this time, many people -- both black and white -- made a precarious living as tenant farmers raising cotton in the rich lands of the Arkansas Delta region and throughout the South and Southwest.

Instead of money, these farmers paid a percentage of their harvest as rent, usually a third or a fourth but sometimes as much as half. With cotton prices plummeting to five cents a pound by the early 1930s -- coupled with the perfidy of some landowners' bookkeeping -- many of these farmers ended each year further in debt, including Handcox's own family. Recognizing the injustice of tenant farming, Handcox quit farming and sought out others who shared his disdain for this repressive and debilitating system, people who were working to make a difference.

In 1934, two members of the local Socialist Party, H.L. Mitchell and Clay East, joined 18 tenant farmers -- both black and white -- at a school house in Tyronza, Arkansas, to form the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). The newly formed union protested evictions of tenant farmers, lobbied both state and federal officials for labor protection and civil rights, and organized strikes to gain better working conditions and increased pay. Due to the STFU's labor agitation and racially-integrated membership, many local individuals and groups violently opposed the union's efforts. Meetings were attacked, members were beaten and jailed, and a few were even killed. Ultimately, the union was forced to move its headquarters to Memphis, Tennessee, as a safety measure. But word began to spread, and tenant farmers took the union's goal of economic justice to new chapters in surrounding states.

Sharecroppers evicted from the Dribble Plantation for union activity congregate by the roadside near Parkin, Arkansas, in the winter of 1936. Photo: John Vachon, held by Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Click to enlarge.

After first learning about the union in 1935, John Handcox said, "Man, that's the thing we needs," and immediately joined. Soon, he became an active organizer and began writing numerous songs and poems about his and other farmers' experiences, many of which appeared in the STFU's newspaper The Sharecropper's Voice. Of this work, he said, "I tried to write something interesting about the conditions that people were living under and what was happening. I wanted to point out when people were working hard and not getting anything out of it."

Within a year, his union activities in support of poor black and white sharecroppers in Arkansas had brought on the very real threat of lynching. Handcox himself reports that a friend came to his house and told him that a group of men were bragging, "That nigger John Handcox, we gonna hang him. We got the rope and we got the limb, all we want is him." Although he wanted to stay and defend his family, his mother and wife convinced him to leave for awhile. first, he went to the STFU headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. At the request of union leaders, Handcox traveled down to Hillhouse, Mississippi, where the STFU had set up a collaborative farming community for evicted tenant farmers called the Delta Cooperative Farm. After a few weeks there, he traveled up to the boot-heel country of Missouri to organize locals for the union. Although he left the area after a few months to help promote and raise money for the STFU elsewhere, his songs remained behind. In fact, protesters involved in the famed Missouri Bootheel Roadside Demonstration in 1939 sang his song "Raggedy, Raggedy," emphasizing the "homeless, homeless are we, just as homeless as we can be" verse.

Handcox traveled far form the cotton fields of the South in an effort to gain support and money for the STFU, visiting Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Washington, DC. While in the capital in March 1937, at the urging of STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell, he dropped by the Library of Congress, where Charles Seeger and his assistant Sidney Robertson recorded six of his songs and two of his poems for the Archive of Folksong.

Due to reasons both economic and personal, Handcox left the STFU and the South at the end of the Depression. During World War II, he joined other members of his extended family in San Diego, where he lived quietly for nearly forty years. But in the 1980s, Handcox again felt called upon to comment on America's political realities, especially after his participation in the 50th Anniversary celebration of the STFU in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1984, he wrote the pointedly political, "Oh No, We Don't Want Reagan anymore" and "Let's Get Reagan Out." Although Handcox had been inactive for several decades, the union community began rediscovering him during this time and invited him to several labor gatherings throughout America.

With his death from cancer on September 18, 1992, John Handcox's voice was finally stilled -- but not his memory or his influence. His work has been revered by the likes of such labor songwriters and performers as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Joe Glazer. But how did these labor minstrels hear of Handcox and his songs or poems? Labor folklorist Archie Green asks, "What would have been Handcox's role had he not recorded any songs in Washington, DC? How could we have come to an appreciation of his contributions?" Yes, these recordings did catch the interest of a young Pete Seeger, whose father Charles had captured them for the Library of Congress. In turn, Seeger sang them for Guthrie -- and the two of them then sang them for thousands of union organizations around the nation in the 1940s. The two then put some of Handcox's work in the radical songbook Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People. Through these efforts and others, Handcox's songs have been passed on and we are still sung on picket lines. In fact, his granddaughter Camellia Cook encountered his song Roll The Union On when she saw television coverage of the 2003 Kroger workers' strike and heard union members singing it. However, few have actually heard Handcox singing his own songs, reciting his own poems, or telling of his life or work with the STFU.

Black and white members of the STFU meet in a school house in Muskogee, Oklahoma, July, 1939. Photo: Russell Lee, held by Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Click to enlarge.

Through the release of these recordings from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, this important labor figure's efforts are now accessible to new generations. His words -- in his songs, poems, and stories -- provide a historical record of the struggles of the STFU and the plight of tenant farmers in the 1930s. At great personal risk, he worked to bring poor cotton farmers together -- both black and white -- so they could find strength in unity to fight for fair wages for their labor and for fair prices of what they raised. He stood up for justice in a time and place where little opportunity existed for the poor. For this effort, and for his songs and poems of truth, John Handcox should be remembered as a labor hero to us all; and he is now able to sing out his rough truth for eternity -- in his own voice.