Mean Things Happening in this Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Co-Founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union

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.

In addition to its original foreword, by renowned socialist intellectual Michael Harrington, this edition contains a new preface by Samuel Mitchell and the author’s posthumous corrections and additions.