No Depression in Heaven by Alison Collis Greene

Author:Alison Collis Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

Religion Reinvented

Spring 1936

The president never visited any Delta sharecroppers, but the First Lady did. “My first glimpse of Arkansas was a drive through very rich country just before sun down on my way to the Dyess Colony,” she wrote. In this New Deal–sponsored resettlement community in Mississippi County, out-of-luck farming families that had been on relief moved into clean, brand-new houses and cleared twenty- to forty-acre plots of land that they hoped to cultivate and one day purchase from the federal government. Eleanor Roosevelt was pleased to see “four hundred and eighty families actually moved into their homes.” Dyess also had a community center, recreation hall, and hospital for families to use, and to which they would contribute.1

“The opportunity is here—it is up to you to develop it,” Roosevelt said to the 2,500 farmers who gathered at the Dyess administration building for her visit. She praised the farmers’ work, encouraged them to “derive gains which may be used to help other people,” and then shook hands with everyone assembled. “It was hot as we stood on the steps of the community center and shook hands with them all,” recounted Roosevelt in her daily column, “but as I looked into their faces as they came by and at the children who slipped around and in and out, I decided that they had character and courage to make good when an opportunity offered.” Finally, she said happily, “that opportunity seemed to be within their reach.”2

Only white families could apply to move to Dyess, but soon Arkansas would house resettlement projects for black families too. Just a few hundred of the tens of thousands of displaced Arkansas families made it successfully through the application process, however, and even then they had to start over in a new place, with new rules and new neighbors. The work was hard and hot. After an evening just shaking hands at the community center, Roosevelt and her companion on the trip “were gasping for something cold to drink.” They enjoyed a “long lemonade” as the train pulled away, while the lucky few at Dyess headed to bed to rest for the long day of work ahead—but finally, it was work on land that might one day be their very own.3

Just three months earlier, Catholic activist Dorothy Day had also traveled to the Arkansas Delta, but she saw a very different world. On a seventeen-degree day in early March, Day rode with members of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union to deliver a carload of supplies she had collected “to bring relief to dispossessed families.” Founded in 1934, this local, interracial organization of landless Delta sharecroppers had drawn the attention of the nation’s religious left, and Day was curious about its work. She rode in the back seat with Marie Pierce, a member of the union’s executive committee.4

They stopped first at Pierce’s house. After eviction from their home “on account of their work for the union,” Pierce and her husband shared a two-room cabin with three other families.

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