Center for Missouri Studies
605 Elm Street
Columbia, MO
Our February 14 noon event features “Oh Freedom After While,” a 58-minute documentary film offering rare footage of the 1939 sharecropper protest and living conditions in Missouri’s bootheel. The documentary is narrated by Julian Bond, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and former chairperson of the NAACP. The film’s writer and co-producer, Candace O’Connor, will answer audience questions after the screening.
The film screening is in conjunction with Black Resistance in the Depression Era: The Missouri Sharecroppers’ Strike of 1939 exhibition at the University of Missouri Ellis Library as part of Black History Month events. Beginning Feb. 7, Ellis Library will exhibit selected photos from SHSMO’s collection of sharecropper images by Arthur Witman, an award-winning photographer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On Feb. 22, 2:30 p.m., SHSMO Art Curator Joan Stack will present a lecture on the exhibition at Ellis Library, room 114A.
About the 1939 Sharecropper Strike in Missouri
In January 1939, Witman documented the strike along Highways 60 and 61 in Southeast Missouri. The local landowners were given funds by the Depression era Agriculture Adjustment Administration to leave their farmlands fallow, and many of these property holders chose to keep the money for themselves and evict the workers who had farmed their land. Reverend Owen Whitfield, a Black labor leader, organized a strike to protest these evictions, bringing about 1,500 of the farm workers together in roadside shantytowns to call public attention to their plight. The photo exhibition and film documentary features images of the strike as well as Witman’s later photos of nearby Cropperville, a village created after the protest where multiple displaced sharecroppers came to live and work communally.