Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Hand-cox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition by Michael K. Honey (review)

This beautifully written book brings a new dimension to the story of a unique southern labor union through the life and work of organizer, activist, songwriter, and poet John L. Handcox. Handcox was a leader in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, a loosely organized union of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and day laborers created during the worst years of the Great Depression in the cotton fields of eastern Arkansas. The union leadership was a combination of white Socialists, who were proponents of J. Alva Taylor’s Social Gospel, and black ministers and sharecroppers, who faced political corruption, planter-led violence, and economic as well as physical intimidation as they strove to create integrated locals in a region where the Ku Klux Klan was alive and well.

The book centers on the life of John Hand-cox, who was born in 1904 near the small farming town of Brinkley, Arkansas. Descended from black slaves, their white masters, and Native Americans, he grew up luckier than many of his neighbors, both black and white, in that his parents owned their own farm. Able to grow what they wanted, when they wanted, the Handcox children were free to attend school more than the standard two months a year attended by the average sharecropper child. Young John was enamored with the work of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and began writing poems and songs primarily as a way to entertain his classmates and family. When his father died suddenly in an accident, John was forced to leave school to help support his family. His education, especially his ability to calculate figures in his head, allowed him to avoid the unscrupulous merchants and businessmen who preyed on the poor. His entrepreneurial spirit kept him ahead of most of his friends and family financially, which allowed greater independence. A keen observer of life, he came to believe that the problems of Africans Americans would never be solved unless the issues of class inequality were addressed and the poor of every color worked together to achieve unity.

Handcox learned of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union from a neighbor, and almost immediately went to work organizing the local farm families. Although not a churchgoer himself, he understood the power of music to unite individuals to a common way of thinking. He began writing new words to old, well-known songs, utilizing a common method to folksingers: shape-note singing, popular in both the African American church and the evangelical white churches in the South, allowed the membership to easily understand his methods and join in. Although he was forced from his family and home early in his organizing career because of death threats, he became one of the union’s most powerful and trusted organizers, bringing both black and white members to the rolls. He also was a well-known and highly respected speaker, although early on identified as a minstrel, who traveled for the union to major cities in the East and Midwest raising money and awareness for the cause.

When the union fragmented over political lines in the late 1930s, he landed on the losing side and was pushed out. He sadly left his union work behind and, in an effort to support his wife and children, as well as his large extended family who had all been blacklisted in the local community for his work in the labor movement, left the South for a job in Southern California, virtually disappearing from the labor music scene for almost 40 years before being “discovered” during the Reagan years. He rejoined the political movement to protest that administration’s policies and was embraced by activists and folk music lovers alike.

Honey does a masterful job of using the numerous oral histories recorded over a 20-year time span. He tells the life story...