"With the Aid of God and the F.S.A.": The Louisiana Farmers' Union and the African American Freedom Struggle in the New Deal Era

Abstract

This article examines African Americans' participation in the Louisiana Farmers' Union, a communist-led, interracial organization of tenant farmers and farm laborers that was active in the cotton and sugar plantation regions of Louisiana in the New Deal era. It argues that rural black people saw the union as an ally in their ongoing struggles for economic justice, access to education, political participation, and protection from violence, and used their union locals to further those goals. The author suggests links between the rural unions of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s by pointing out continuities in the objectives of African American activists in both decades.