1891 cotton pickers' strike

Labor action of African-American sharecroppers in Arkansas January 2026 February 2025 thumb|Monument at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice memorializing the Black individuals lynched following the strike. The cotton pickers' strike of 1891 was a labor action of African-American sharecroppers in Lee County, Arkansas in September 1891. The strike led to open conflict between strikers and plantation owners, racially motivated violence, and both a sheriff's posse and a lynching party. One plantation manager, two non-striking workers, and some twelve strikers were killed during the incident.Lancaster Guy Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4267 Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture 28 November 2018 Nine of those strikers were hanged in a mass lynching on the evening of September 29.https://books.google.com/books?id=TepAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA12 29 November 2018 untitled New York Times 2 October 1891, as quoted in "Crime and Criminal Law in the United States", the Edinburgh Review or Critical Journal, July 1892, pgs. 12-13 Background In 1886 the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union had been founded by R.M. Humphrey, a white Baptist minister, reformer, and member of the parallel white Farmers' Alliance organization. Early in September 1891, Humphrey called for a national African-American strike of sharecroppers against planters, in response to the planters setting 50-cent-per-100-pound prices at their summer conventions.Hild Matthew Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South 25 May 2010 University of Georgia Press 143 https://books.google.com/books?id=6pe7kaB1TcgC&pg=PA143 28 November 2018 9780820336565 Despite its extensive claimed membership of millions,Colored Farmers' Alliance and Laborers' Union, Tennessee https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/colored-farmers-alliance-and-laborers-union-tennessee/ Tennessee Encyclopedia 28 November 2018 and despite Humphrey's announcement of 600,000 members firmly committed to strike for $1 per 100 pounds,Colored cotton pickers strike https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3394092/colored_cotton_pickers_strike/ 28 November 2018 New Orleans Times-Picayune 7 September 1891 the strike promoted for September 12 took hold nowhere. Additionally, many landowners who became aware of the planned strike took steps to suppress or outright prevent the strike through increased police presence and pacification tactics such as smaller raises.Biegert M. L. 1998-09-01 Legacy of Resistance: Uncovering the History of Collective Action by Black Agricultural Workers in Central East Arkansas from the 1860s to the 1930s https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-lookup/doi/10.1353/jsh/32.1.73 Journal of Social History en 32 1 73–99 10.1353/jsh/32.1.73 0022-4529 subscription Its failure was noted and documented with some satisfaction in newspapers across the cotton-growing south. The one exception was in Lee County, a location with its own history of conflict, on the Mississippi River and across from Memphis, Tennessee. Ben Patterson, a Black labor organizer from Memphis, traveled to Lee County at the beginning of September 1891 and began to organize a strike among local cotton pickers. Patterson's efforts were significantly more successful than those of Humphrey, garnering the support of at least twenty-five pickers in Lee County. The strike Workers for planter Colonel H.P. Rodgers struck on September 20, demanding higher wages, and began traveling through the county looking for support. These workers were from Memphis, led by a Ben Patterson. Among other workers in the county they found no support. A brawl between striking and non-striking workers killed two on September 25.Lancaster Guy Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4267 Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture 28 November 2018 On the 28th the strikers killed a notorious plantation manager named Miller and burned a cotton gin. A posse, with some black members, was organized under Sheriff Derrick of Marianna to track down the remaining strikers and Patterson,Wyman Mark Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West 27 April 2010 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 121 https://books.google.com/books?id=Yt24EKAynCIC&pg=PA121 28 November 2018 9781429945905 partly on the grounds that Miller the plantation manager had been deputized. On September 29 the search led north to an island near Horseshoe Lake in Crittenden County. The strikers had been trying to work north, back to President's Island and then to Memphis. In an open battle the posse killed two strikers and captured nine. At more or less the same time, Patterson alone escaped to the steamboat James Lee and admitted his story, but was extracted from the boat, taken ashore, and shot. The nine prisoners under guard by the sheriff's men were intercepted on the road by a masked lynching party, greatly outnumbering them, that took the prisoners and hanged them one by one.Wiping Out the Negroes https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015679/1891-10-02/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1789&index=2&rows=20&words=Arkansas+StrikingCotton-Pickers 28 November 2018 Indianapolis Journal 2 October 1891 The Arkansas Gazette ran coverage under the title "Lee County Trouble Settled with Rope".Lancaster Guy Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950 31 December 2017 University of Arkansas Press 82 https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4M4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA82 29 November 2018 9781610756228 The incident directly led to the collapse of the Colored Farmers' Alliance.Holmes William F. The Arkansas Cotton Pickers Strike of 1891 and the Demise of the Colored Farmers's Alliance The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 2 107–119 40030730 1973 10.2307/40030730 See also Organized labour List of massacres in the United States List of worker deaths in United States labor disputes References Category:1890s strikes in the United States Category:Labor disputes in Arkansas Category:Agriculture and forestry labor disputes in the United States Category:Anti-union violence in the United States Category:History of African-American civil rights Category:Lynching deaths in Arkansas Category:Crimes in Arkansas Category:Massacres of African Americans Category:1891 labor disputes and strikes Category:1891 conflicts Category:1891 in Arkansas Category:Massacres of protesters in the United States Category:Massacres in 1891 Category:Racially motivated violence against African Americans in Arkansas Category:African-American lynching victims Category:Mass lynchings Category:19th-century mass murders in the United States