Roll the Union on: A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union

Founded near Tyronza, Arkansas, in 1934 by 11 white and 7 black workers, within five years the STFU was organizing all across the South and counting its members in the tens of thousands. Reviving old IWW traditions of workers’ solidarity and direct action as its members added many an innovation discovered in the course of new struggles, the STFU brought a luster all its own to the labor insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s. The first fully integrated multiracial union in the modern South, the STFU prefigured not only later farm-workers’ unionization by also the civil rights agitation of the 1960s and the growing rank and file labor revolt of our own time. Here is the dramatic first-hand account of the origins, struggles, strikes, achievements, humor, songs and poems of the rural south, told through one of the founders of the union.