7 Days of Learning (DAY 2): STRIKE CITY, MISSISSIPPI...For more than a century after the end of the Civil War and the ostensible emancipation of slaves, sharecropping existed as similarly oppressive means of survival for many blacks in the Southern part of the United States. Low-cost laborers were needed by planters in order to chop weeds to clear land, pick crops, plant and till...newly-freed black men and their families were given benefits (such as rent-free housing, a small plot of garden, a small stipend with which to survive winters during which they could not harvest, medical care in case of emergencies, and social shelter during a time when life for independent blacks was not especially safe) in exchange for working the land. During harvesting season in the spring, every man, woman, and even child living on the sharecropping plantations was put to work. During the 1960s, in the Mississippi Delta, women and children were paid $3 a day to work from 5:30 in the morning until dark to do the chopping, while the men were paid no more than $6 a day to drive the tractors and other machines. In May of 1965, a dozen tractor drivers led by John Henry Sylvester, a tall, strapping black man with a powerful voice, told the plantation owner A.L. Andrews, that they, their wives and children would no longer work unless the mens wages were raised from the flat rate of $6 a day to $1.25 an hour. When Andrews refused, Sylvester led his wife, their 15 children and 11 other families (totaling almost 80 people) off of the plantation. They picketed on the outskirts of Andrews 1,300-acre farm for a year, and in that time, with the help of other black laborers and white activists, pooled together their resources to start a town of their own where blacks in Mississippi could be free of a life dictated by an economic system run solely by whites. They named their town Strike City. It still exists today. One of the most amazing things about this strike is that these laborers were giving up the only personal security and economic stability that they knew in life by abandoning the plantation. One striker said We didn’t know what was gonna happen. We was taking a chance. But we had got tired of working for nothing. Their actions emboldened those to come of their children, who were among the first to register for admission into newly-segregated schools in the Mississippi Delta. This was, at the time, an unprecedented show of unity in that area of the country among blacks and the whites that helped them to mobilize.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 02:00:42 +0000
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