Reseña de Owen Whitfield and the Gospel of the Working Class in New Deal America, 1936-1946.

Owen Whitfield and the Gospel of the Working Class in New Deal America, 1936-1946. de Journal of Southern History Resumen del Libro

WHEN IN APRIL 1932 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT spoke of "the forgotten man," he was not referring to an African American sharecropper named Owen Whitfield. (1) However, by decade's end, Roosevelt would sit down with Whitfield in the White House to discuss the plight of southern tillers of the soil. Whitfield is best known as the leader of a roadside demonstration in Missouri in 1939 in which he mobilized fifteen hundred desperate black and white sharecroppers to dramatically protest their worsening rural poverty. Perhaps more than any other single depression-era event, this southeast Missouri protest, where sharecroppers proudly stood amid their meager belongings along two federal highways, made America's dispossessed visible to the nation. Yet, while the demonstration helped make Whitfield a national figure, it marked only a single episode in a life of much broader work among the downtrodden. (2) As an organizer and activist between 1936 and 1946, Whitfield worked to transform the aspirations and struggles of black southerners, first in the cotton fields of southeast Missouri and later in southern cities, into concerted collective action in pursuit of social and economic justice. A black sharecropper and preacher, Whitfield cultivated and gave voice to an independent, grassroots radicalism that emerged amid the collapse of relatively stable and prosperous black farming communities in the early 1930s. He did this by refashioning the core beliefs at the heart of these communities--beliefs in the power of religion, the dignity of hard work, and the life-giving bonds of family and civic responsibility--into a vibrant indigenous protest movement tooled for the political realities of the New Deal. While Whitfield worked closely with national labor and civil rights organizations throughout his career, he allied with them only as a means to amplify the voice of the grassroots movement he represented. (3)

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