Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

White, Derrick

Abstract

This paper explores the lives of poor, black sharecropping women, arguing that the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union provided an avenue for them to embrace civil rights activism, perform semiprofessional work, and construct a sisterhood of black female solidarity – thus making the union an organization through which lower-class African American women contributed to the Long Civil Rights movement. During the Great Depression, black and white farmwomen from the Delta region worked together to fight the system of racial subjugation and exploitation. Black women represented one of the largest and most important demographic groups within the STFU, frequently serving as secretaries, local presidents, and organizers for the union. The administrative records and public literature generated from within the STFU movement show that these women made great strides in pioneering the model of gender-neutral, racially cooperative activism that would be later embraced by SNCC during the mid-twentieth century civil rights movements movement in which many of them as “movement mammas.”

Extent

233 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00004176

Format

pdf

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