STFU or What I Learned in Arkansas

Johnny Cash grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, fifty miles northwest of Memphis. (Pronounced locally – somehow only one syllable – as “Dowus.”) Cross the Mississippi, turn north on I-55; exit at Highway 14, head west six miles, then left on 297 aka Johnny Cash Highway and you’re there. Johnny, known then as J.R., was three years old when he and his parents and four siblings moved into their new Dyess Colony home in 1935.

The Dyess Colony was an “agricultural resettlement community” under the Works Progress Administration to give impoverished sharecroppers and tenant farmers a chance to earn a living. The first families arrived in 1934, during the depths of the Depression. Each of the families settling in Dyess was provided with approximately 20 acres, along with a house, barn, smokehouse, chicken coop and privy. The arrangement was to clear the land, farm it – mostly cotton – and pay back the government with the income derived from the land. The colony grew to almost five hundred families. White families.

The New Deal project struggled under interference from the Arkansas governor and legislature that wanted no interference from the Federal government in their state. (Sound familiar?) Trying to make a family’s living on twenty acres was more than difficult and the attraction of manufacturing jobs in the north also contributed to the colony’s eventual demise. J.R. left to join the Air Force after graduating from high school in 1950. The Dyess Colony project was officially terminated the following year and the community fell into disrepair.

Today, Arkansas State University oversees the location as part of its Heritage Sites Program. Proceeds from the Johnny Cash Music Festival beginning in 2011 on the ASU campus paid for restoration of the Cash home and a visitor’s center in the town circle. The music festival became the Johnny Cash Heritage Festival and relocated to Dyess in 2017. The festival expanded to include informational sessions about the colony’s history.

Dyess Colony was not an option for non-whites

There was no federal program for non-white farmers. African-Americans were on their own, trying to get by sharecropping or tenant farming. About a hundred miles down the Mississippi River, in Elaine (pronounced EE-laine) Arkansas, black sharecroppers had the temerity to form the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in 1919. About a hundred black farmers met in a church to strategize how to get increased payments for cotton from the white landowners. As the today’s occupant of the White House suggests, they posted armed guards for their protection. The white intruders were also armed. The resulting shootout left a white interloper dead and a white deputy sheriff wounded.

The next day hundreds of whites gathered to put down the so-called insurrection and “began to hunt negroes and shotting [sic] them as they came to them.” Five hundred U.S. troops arrived later. Those the soldiers didn’t kill were rounded up and herded into a makeshift stockade. More than two hundred black residents were murdered. A month later the county grand jury charged 122 African-Americans with crimes ranging from murder to “nightriding.” When a dozen were promptly sentenced to death, another sixty-five bargained lengthy prison sentences for second-degree murder pleas. The ten-year old NAACP took up the defense, first obtaining stays of execution of the capitol cases while the appeals were made. It took five years, but the dozen were released in exchange for second-degree murder pleas. The others were also let go.

Racial accord, such as it was, came slowly to the region. The same year white families began moving in to Dyess Colony, eleven white and seven black farmers gathered in a small schoolhouse a few miles down the road in the town of Tyronza. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union came out of this meeting. The result was predictable: intimidation and violence, eviction of tenants and firing of farm laborers.

Arkansas State University’s Heritage Sites Program operates the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in Tyronza.

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