Cotton Tenants

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”

Case study of agricultural development and social change among nomads and tenant farmers under the New Halfa Scheme in Eastern Sudan since 1970 - describes the farming system imposed by the land settlement scheme; notes agricultural management problems and poor crop yield, accompanied by social stratification, proletarianization and rural migration; draws some development policy conclusions. Bibliography, graphs, maps, photographs, statistical tables.

The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union was founded in eastern Arkansas in 1934 to protest the New Deal's enrichment of Southern cotton barons at the expense of suffering sharecroppers, both black and white. Their courageous struggle, in the face of determined and often violent resistance from their landlords, is the subject of this thorough study from Donald H. Grubbs, which was published to critical acclaim in 1971. Cry from the Cotton was the first full-scale look at the STFU and its leaders. It discloses that, although the union operated under noticeable socialist party sponsorship in its infancy, it drew much more upon the native Southern evangelical and populist traditions, much as the civil rights movement would do twenty-five years later. Grubbs convincingly demonstrates that while the STFU failed to gain immediate social justice for its members, it resulted in the formation of the Farm Security Administration, which even today continues to aid the rural poor, and it played a large part in forcing the formation of the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, whose spotlight on management terrorism helped the CIO toward success. The volume stands as a classic on labor issues and class struggle and still echoes with the haunting plea of the dispossessed for equity.

The story of Greene county, Georgia, and its unified farm program. cf. Foreword.

Cotton growing-Government policy-Texas-Historly 2. Cotton trade-government policy-Texas-History. 3. New Deal1933-1939-Texas. 4. United States.