Sharecropper's Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, and the African American Song Tradition

Abstract

Sharecropper's Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, and the African American Song Tradition. By Michael K. Honey. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xix, 210. Acknowledgments, foreword by Pete Seeger, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)In Sharecropper's Troubadour, labor historian Michael K. Honey provides readers with a moving and worthwhile oral history of African- American union activist and folk singer John L. Handcox. The book is also a call to action. "Hopefully," writes Honey, "Sharecropper's Troubadour will help us to understand the sharecroppers' revolt of the 1930s in a personal and emotive way" (p. 3). Honey wants Handcox's life in the trenches to inspire a new generation of social justice advocates. "As laboring people today fight for some way to make their way in the global economy," Honey implores his readers, "it remains useful to remember when evangelicals, labor radicals, 'white' folks and people of color, women and men, combined their dreams and mixed their tactics" (p. 154).Born near Brinkley, in Monroe County, Arkansas, John Handcox "grew up in one of the hardest places and at one of the hardest times to be black in America" (p. 12). However, Handcox's early life cautions historians not to paint the African-American experience under Jim Crow with broad strokes. Handcox's parents owned land (though it wouldn't "raise a fuss"), he was literate from a young age (and loved the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar), and was quite skeptical of formal religion (p. 18). Still, Handcox's oral histories note the precarious nature of life in rural Arkansas for those who relied upon the land. One year's success would not necessarily translate into long-term success. After Handcox's father's death, the family moved to St. Francis County in the Arkansas Delta where he experienced natural disasters, unfathomable poverty, the ruthless practice of debt peonage, and threats of violence. "In the 1930s, deadly repression against labor organizers occurred across the country," writes Honey, "but eastern Arkansas was in a class unto itself" (p. 84).Throughout the book, Handcox offers poignant yet stark firsthand accounts of life during Jim Crow. "The way I see it, under slavery we used to be the master's slave," declared Handcox, "but after slavery we became everybody's slave" (p. 11). Never one to take life lying down, Handcox become a socialist, a folk singer, and a labor organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in the 1930s. Most of the book dwells on the Depression years, which also saw the height of Handcox's relative fame. Relying heavily on oral history methodology, Honey uses Handcox as a conduit for understanding the sharecropper movement in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri. …