Unrecorded Report on a Long-Gone Missouri Sharecropping Cooperative

[Sharecropping]: [Missouri]: American Friends Service Committee:

Report on Cropperville by the 1941 Summer Work Camp of the American Friends Service Committee at the Sharecropper Camp near Harviell, Missouri. Confidential [cover title].

[N.p., probably New York]: 1941. [2],21pp. of typed or mimeographed sheets. Quarto. Original yellow printed wrappers, stapled, with three-ring punch holes. Minor wear and dust soiling to wrappers. Internally clean. Very good plus. Item #13192

An unrecorded report issued by the American Friends Service Committee about the self-governing, racially integrated cooperative community established by evicted sharecroppers and the Rev. Owen Whitfield in "Swamp East Missouri." The report opens with a background passage on the camp, followed by chapters on present conditions in the community, work camp activities, future plans, and conclusions, each with separately prepared articles by a variety of named authors. The various articles describe conditions within the community and the AFSC's efforts to support the sharecroppers; a sampling of articles within the report include "Comparative Study of Living Standards of Two Cropperville Families," "Sanitation and Health," "The Women's Club," "Inter-Community Relations," "Farm Security Administration Plans," "Future of the Community," and "Future Camps."

According to the introductory background passage, Cropperville was started in 1939 when African-American minister, Rev. Owen H. Whitfield brought 1,700 families "(sixty percent colored, forty percent white)" to an eighty-mile area of public land along Highway 61. These were largely sharecroppers protesting against the New Deal government's Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. Upon arrival in Missouri, the tenant farmers were "carried in state highway trucks back away from the arterial highway to hastily-thrown-up camps behind the levee, to tiny churches, to abandoned buildings where they were overcrowded and had no sanitation facilities." The group was then moved to land closer to Poplar Bluff, where they had to clear the land and build their community amid attacks from "local vigilante groups who hoped to drive out the unwanted newcomers." After some early success, the Cropperville experiment failed and the area is now a ghost town.

We could locate no other copies of this informative report on Cropperville anywhere.

Price: $650