Mean Things Happening in This Land
H.L. Mitchell, signed by author
$25.00

A rare firsthand chronicle of one of the most racially progressive unions in twentieth-century America. When, during the Great Depression, tenant farmers and sharecroppers were pushed off the land they had worked but never owned, many sought power in numbers by organizing unions. In 1934, seven black men and eleven white men organized the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Socialist Harry Leland Mitchell was one of those men. ‘Mean Things Happening in This Land’ is his autobiographical account of SFTU struggles – against poverty, New Deal agencies, communists, and above all, the southern planter class – to achieve economic justice in the cotton fields. There is a foreword by renowned socialist intellectual Michael Harrington,