Founding Mothers and Movement Mamas: African American Women in the Depression-Era Southern Tenant Famers' Union

This paper explores the lives of poor, black sharecropping women, arguing that
the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union provided an avenue for them to embrace civil rights
activism, perform semiprofessional work, and construct a sisterhood of black female
solidarity – thus making the union an organization through which lower-class African
American women contributed to the Long Civil Rights movement. During the Great
Depression, black and white farmwomen from the Delta region worked together to fight
the system of racial subjugation and exploitation. Black women represented one of the
largest and most important demographic groups within the STFU, frequently serving as
secretaries, local presidents, and organizers for the union. The administrative records and
public literature generated from within the STFU movement show that these women
made great strides in pioneering the model of gender-neutral, racially cooperative
activism that would be later embraced by SNCC during the mid-twentieth century civil
rights movements movement in which many of them as “movement mammas.”