Socialist Gains Belated Recognition : Efforts to Organize Poor Farmers Led to Inspirational Music

I was in the river, fishing, and my momma and my wife come running down, hollering for me. Their voice was so distressful, I just knew something happen with the kids. But my momma said, “John. You better get away from here.” You see, a friend of mine, a white fellow, he’d been up at the store and overheard them say, “That nigger John Handcox, we gonna hang him. We got the rope and we got the limb, all we want is him.”

Mean things were happening in Arkansas in 1936, the year John L. Handcox learned of the noose with his name on it. Sharecroppers were working from sunup to sundown for 50 cents a day, then sleeping at night on cotton sacks stuffed with straw.

The plantation stores were overcharging tenant farmers, who labored all year just to end up in debt. Even nature sometimes seemed mean, flooding the fertile river valleys, leaving cotton only on the eroding hillsides.

Handcox, a poor farmer with a ninth-grade education, didn’t like anything unfair. He didn’t like anything mean. When he heard that the Socialists were forming a racially integrated labor union, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Handcox thought it sounded like a good idea and he joined.

He helped to organize other black sharecroppers into locals, and since he didn’t care for making speeches, he started to write songs for them to sing at their meetings.

From 1935 to 1937, Handcox wrote dozens of poems and songs, including “Roll the Union On,” “Raggedy, Raggedy Are We,” and “There is Mean Things Happening in this Land”--classics of the labor movement.

Handcox’s music gave farmers inspiration on the picket lines, but it made the plantation owners mad. His organizing made them mean enough to string a lanky, blue-eyed black from a tree.

I said, “Momma, I’m not going anywhere. If they come ‘round here, if they stick their heads up, I’ll shoot ‘em.” She said, “If you hurt one of them, they gonna kill us all.” That’s right, too. There wouldn’t a been no Handcox left.

I went over on the highway. At that time they just had a gravel road. Two lanes--one going, one coming. I caught a Greyhound. I caught that puppy to Memphis.

Handcox is 81 now and lives in a quiet corner of Southeast San Diego. He is rail-thin with an ebony face, salt and pepper hair and a white beard. He is still poor, still a union member--United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America--and still writing songs.

Handcox said it is possible he had heard of folk singer Pete Seeger before receiving letters from Seeger recently, but he isn’t sure. He has never been too good with names.

Seeger, however, had known of Handcox and his songs for more than 40 years. Seeger’s partner in “The Weavers,” Lee Hays, had taught him some of Handcox’s tunes long ago, and Seeger’s father, Charles, had recorded Handcox on an aluminum disk for the Library of Congress in about 1937, when the elder Seeger worked on a WPA music project.

“John is one of the rank-and-file people who make up the folk songs of the nation,” Seeger said in a telephone interview from his home in Beacon, N.Y. “Some of the songs he wrote in the 1930s became famous throughout the English-speaking world.”

Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie had tried unsuccessfully to find Handcox in the 1940s when they were compiling material for their songbook, “Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.”

“By the time the 1960s came along, I assumed he was dead. Foolish me,” Seeger said.

Handcox was in San Diego, where he settled in 1942 when he discovered the Southland’s good weather. Seeger finally tracked Handcox through folk singer Joe Glazer, who had located him through H.L. Mitchell, a founder of the farmers’ union. After 40 years, Handcox had called Mitchell.

As was common among union troubadours, Handcox never bothered to copyright his songs. Seeger wrote him to tell him that he wanted to help Handcox put his name on his work.

Seeger has asked his publisher at Sanga Music in New York City to help Handcox with the copyright work. He also has raised money to buy Handcox an airplane ticket to Washington, D.C., next month to join in the Great Labor Song Exchange, an annual meeting of labor songwriters and singers organized by Joe Glazer.

Labor music, characterized by songs such as “Solidarity Forever” and “Union Maid,” is used to build unity and to tell labor’s side of a story. Glazer says the music usually is written during strikes and periods of crisis, and many of the songs are adapted from Southern gospel hymns.

“The line from the church hall to the union hall is direct many times,” Glazer said.

Seeger says there’s no reason Handcox should have heard of him. So, by way of introduction, he wrote Handcox:

“I am only too aware that I am one more white musician who has made a living when black musicians who composed the music often made no money at all.”

Seeger said many of the country’s folk and union songs--”Home on the Range,” “The Ballad of Jesse James,” “We Shall Not Be Moved”--have been passed on orally and never were claimed by their original authors. He told Handcox that even copyrighted folk songs rarely earn a lot of money for their authors, but that someday one of Handcox’s songs could be used in a movie and earn something for his family.

“Do you realize if you’d gotten $25 every time ‘Roll the Union On’ had been printed in a songbook during the last 30 years, you’d have several thousand dollars?” Seeger wrote.

Seeger said Handcox’s songs have rare depth and simplicity that have made them stand up over time. He called “Roll the Union On” “a great picket line song. One of the greatest ever,” and broke into verse over the telephone:

We’re gonna roll,

We’re gonna roll,

We’re gonna roll the union on.

If the planter’s in the way, we’re gonna roll it over him,

Gonna roll it over him, gonna roll it over him . . .

His father’s mother was the half-white daughter of a slave and a slave owner; his mother’s father was “a full-blooded African” slave. On rainy days, Handcox’s grandfather used to tell him stories about slavery.

“The way he told it, we were better off under slavery than after. Under slavery he was valuable. But after slavery, he was anybody and everybody’s slave with no one to protect him,” Handcox said.

His parents were tenant farmers, better off than many only because they owned mules, hoes, cotton sack and other tools. That meant they could work “thirds and fourths”--paying the landlord a third of their corn crop and a fourth of their cotton for use of the land--instead of turning over half the yield, as did the sharecroppers who owned nothing.

Handcox was the third son of 11 children, born near Brinkley, Ark., about half way between Little Rock and Memphis. As a young boy, he was sick each fall with tonsillitis that persisted for months at a time--despite mustard plasters, kerosene rubs and liniments--and kept him from starting school until he was nearly 9 years old.

He learned to read at home from his mother. His father subscribed to the newspaper and, from it, they read aloud about lynchings, about how the white men would tie a Negro behind a wagon with a chain around his neck and drag him around town.

When Handcox was about 12, his father brought home a book of poems by the black author Paul Laurence Dunbar. Handcox loved Dunbar’s funny poems, and began to write his own.

“I’d write poems about the kids in school. Something to make people laugh,” Handcox said. He would write poems for Easter celebrations and school programs. He wrote a graduation speech on “perseverance,” and wrote a play that was put on at church.

When Handcox was 19 and finishing the ninth grade, his father was killed by a team of mules. Handcox left school to farm and manage the family, and didn’t find time to write again until he joined the union nearly a dozen years later.

The farm economy had not recovered from the Depression. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agriculture administration was paying landowners to reduce their production in order to raise the price of cotton and other crops. The result was disastrous for hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers, tenant farmers and day laborers who were forced off the land and out of work.

In July of that year, two Norman Thomas Socialists formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union to fight for better wages, against tenant farmer evictions, and ultimately, for socialist farming cooperatives.

When a friend told Handcox about the union in 1935, he said, “That’s good news. Let’s set up a local.”

“The people were being treated unfair. I know they wasn’t getting out of debt. They were just working for what they eat and wore and that wasn’t much. Wasn’t nothing to smile over,” Handcox said.

Handcox encouraged farmers to ask for bills when they made purchases from the plantation store, to keep track of their own debts. He went from house to house on his horse until he rounded up enough farmers to set up a union local, and then another.

The farmers met in schoolhouses and churches, the places where Handcox had learned to sing. Handcox couldn’t play any instruments, but he could write. He composed poems and songs for the farmers, passed them out at the meetings, and sent them to be published in the union’s newspaper, The Sharecroppers’ Voice.

When a sharecropper dies,

He is buried in a box

Without any necktie

And without any sox.

“All these songs and poems is about the way the people was being treated,” Handcox said. “Singing is inspirational. More inspirational than talk. It arouses people more, makes them feel a part of things.”

The union grew to 25,000 members in six states by 1935, and to 31,000 members the next year. Handcox worked hard at the organizing and farming, but a string of bad luck and bad weather forced him to sharecrop in 1935.

At the end of the season, Handcox added up his earnings and his wife’s earnings, subtracted what they owed, and realized that together they had made only $250. He gave up farming for fishing, but continued to work with the union, helping to organize a strike that spread over three counties in 1936.

There was an outdoor meeting and the moonlight was bright. We was about half a block from the Big Man’s house. I was making a speech, telling the people the planters had a strategy. In a good crop year the prices would start off pretty good. Then the prices would go fall down.

They claim a surplus, but the people that really needs it and can use it are the ones that can’t afford it. If they had it all turned to clothes and bedding, you could get off those straw beds. There wouldn’t be no surplus. The people was wearing patches. Their clothes was just patches on patches.

The owners up there at the house, we heard them say, “You hear that nigger calling the government a liar.” They said it loud enough for me to hear and the others to hear, but we didn’t stop the meeting.

The farmers met with evictions, beatings, arrests and threats. While the workers never secured a contract, they did earn wage increases for cotton pickers in a strike the year before. But in 1936, Gov. Junius Marion Futrell called out the National Guard to put down the strike.

There is mean things happening in this land,

There is mean things happening in this land,

But the union’s going on,

And the union’s going strong,

There is mean things happening in this land.

“The National Guard set up their machine guns and tents and people gathered around to watch ‘em do it,” Mitchell, one of the union’s founders, recalled in a telephone interview.

Two blacks died in vigilante violence, he said, and the farmers lost the strike. Handcox was run out of town.

Handcox went from Memphis to Charleston, Mo., to St. Louis, working for the union. He made a fund-raising trip to New York and Washington, D.C., where Charles Seeger recorded his songs.

But Handcox was having trouble supporting his wife and four children on union work. He earned 25 cents for every member he recruited, but he often used the money he earned to pay the dues of new recruits.

Handcox joined the Socialist Party and headed for Chicago, where he spoke at party meetings and searched for a job. He handed his songs and poems out at meetings, accepting donations of 25 or 50 cents or giving them away for free.

“Life is not a matter of money with me,” he said.

But a man has to make a living. Finding little work in Chicago, Handcox left for Detroit; Kansas City, Mo., then south to Oklahoma, and finally California.

In San Diego, Handcox peddled fish, eggs and fruit out of a truck, ran a small grocery store and a restaurant, and worked as a carpenter.

He joined the carpenter’s union, but found that it allowed contractors to discriminate against blacks. He belonged to a Socialist Party local until it fell apart when several members moved to Los Angeles.

Handcox organized pickets at neighborhood businesses that depended on black customers, but refused to hire them. Two grocery stores finally agreed to employ blacks, but a movie theater refused.

“The owner, he said, ‘Nigger, I’ll close my show up before I’ll hire niggers,’ ” Handcox recalled. The theater closed down.

Handcox’s political involvement slowed and he stopped writing songs. He had his ups and downs like anyone, but always kept busy.

I worked in L.A. for awhile and was back here staying with my momma. A friend of mine called and told my momma the FBI come by asking about me. I was eager to find out what the FBI wanted with me. It had been three or four years since I’d been to a party meeting. So I went up to L.A. and called.

They come by and I invited them in to my friend’s house, but they said, “No, you come out to the car.” They was asking did I belong to the Socialist Party. I said, “Yes. I prefer it over the Democrat and Republican cause they nothing but rich people’s parties and I don’t have no money.”

I tell them, “now you all chasing after me, but you didn’t do nothing to these people that kill Emmett Till.” He was the Negro 14 years old who they killed in Mississippi (for whistling at a white woman).

They say they got to go now, but I say, “You all want to talk to me. Well, I’m going to talk to you.”

Today, Handcox survives on Social Security checks, tends his garden and goes fishing when he gets a chance. He clips articles out of the newspaper about Reagan Administration budget cuts and figures out how much the President earns each day.

“When he was elected he earn $545.45 per day. Now he gets $684.93 a day,” Handcox said.

Reagan makes Handcox so mad, in fact, that he took up writing protest songs again--this time against Reagan.

Handcox says times are far better for his 28 grandchildren and nearly 90 great-grandchildren than they were for blacks in the 1930s and 1940s. But he says blacks still have a long way to go.

“If you’ve never been black, you can’t hardly sympathize with what black people went through. I don’t hate white people. I don’t have no hatred. We’re getting a better break now than we ever did, and we’re not getting a fair deal now,” he said.

Handcox still sings occasionally at fund-raisers for progressive causes, and hopes his songs will help to prevent mean things from happening in this land.

“If my songs help make this a better world to live in, I think I did a lot.”