6. Descriptions of the Collections


American Exchange and Trust, headquartered in Little Rock, with 72 branches throughout the state,
closed its doors. Farmers were particularly hard hit, and by the end of 1930, sixty-three percent of all
Arkansas farmers fell into tenancy. Farmers growing rice in Arkansas and Prairie counties, however, were
fortunate as their products could be sold. For those who planted cotton, it was an entirely different
matter. The drought of 1930-1931, coupled with the drop in price of cotton, was crippling.

In July of 1934, in a run-down school house near Tyronza, Arkansas, H.L. Mitchell and Henry Clay East
were among those who established the Southern Tenants Farmers' Union (STFU). The original
membership consisted of eleven white members and seven black members. Ironically, some of the
founders reportedly were former members of the Ku Klux Klan, and one of the blacks was a survivor of
the 1919 riot at Elaine, Arkansas. By the end of 1935 the STFU had a heavy concentration of members
in northeast Arkansas and claimed a total of approximately 30,000 members in neighboring states.

The deplorable conditions of farmers and sharecroppers drew national attention. Correspondents from
afar traversed the Delta country and reported on what they saw. English writer Naomi Mitchinson stated:
"I have traveled over most of Europe and part of Africa but I have never seen such terrible sights as I saw
yesterday among the sharecroppers of Arkansas." Eleanor Roosevelt, in a April 4, 1936 letter to Senate
majority leader Joe T. Robinson of Arkansas, stated: "Three share croppers, two of them from Arkansas,
came to see me in New York the other day and I was deeply troubled by the stories they tell...I am very
anxious about it and know you must feel the same way. I wonder if it would not be possible to send
some one down to try to get a better understanding between the people than there seems to be at present."
Titles such sd Recent Changes in Farm Labor Organization in Three Arkansas Plantation Counties, a
1939 report issued by the University's Department of Rural Economics and Sociology, document the
issues of the day.

The Dyess Colony was an attempt to reestablish impoverished farmers under circumstances that would
give them a reasonable chance for success. Named for W.R. Dyess, first administrator of the Works
Progress Administration in Arkansas, the colony was founded in 1934 in Mississippi County as an
experiment that was assisted by the federal government. Members of the colony, selected from state
relief rolls, were centered in dwellings around a community hospital, a bank, feed mill, cotton gin,
canning building, library, and other service facilities. Farms were worked on an individual basis, but
community tasks were often performed by members on a cooperative basis. The Colony received notice
in the national press because of such a large scale operation and support of the federal government.
Shortly before 1940 the Farm Security Administration assumed control of the Dyess Colony. To this
day some of the buildings still exist at Dyess, Arkansas.

Some students of the period credit the STFU for touching off a reaction that pushed the New Deal toward
far bolder action on the farm front than otherwise may have been the case. In Arkansas, Governor J.
Marion Futrell appointed a group of leading citizens to the Arkansas Tenancy Commission in 1936 to
review the plight of the sharecroppers. Most of their recommendations were incorporated in the
Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937. But the STFU wanted sweeping changes. In the June 1937
issue of The Sharecropper's Voice, the official organ of the STFU, the editor called for Arkansas
Governor Carl E. Bailey to repeal the poll tax law: "There can be no democracy in Arkansas so long as
thousands of sharecroppers--probably a majority of the citizens of the state--are denied the vote because
they are too poor to pay the poll tax."

As reflected in publications such as Land Tenure in Arkansas, a 1945 report issued by the Department of
Rural Economics and Sociology of the University of Arkansas, the great majority of Arkansans were still
on farms and dependent on them for a living at the beginning of World War II. And while politicians
had an impact on the life of the farm community, those outside of the political arena caused
revolutionary changes that would have a tremendous impact on agriculture and rural life. There were
engineers in Detroit who perfected the tractor to do more than a mule; botanists, entomologists, and