Full Text of the Excerpt

Then, I've been a member of the National Sharecropper's Fund which is also known as the Rural Advancement Fund. This was started in the late thirties when the mechanized cotton picker came in and started to displace the sharecroppers in the cotton fields. Cotton was king at that time and sharecropping was a way of life for many, many people. So they started to displace the sharecropper and they organized the Sharecropper's Union, the National Sharecropper's Union. They were very active in Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi. Then they became the National Agricultural Workers Union for the sharecroppers, cotton and every other kind of crop. When I went with Joe Rauh in 1952, we represented Mr. H.L. Mitchell who was the President of the Union. The Union didn't have any money, so Joe Rauh assigned me to them because he had to earn money to keep the firm going. So he represented the Auto Workers who paid and I represented the sharecroppers who didn't pay. We had a lot of strikes hither and yon and injunctions and organizing and activities. Then I think it was when I came here, I was asked to serve on…. Van Hecke, who had been the former dean, had written the "Van Hecke Report of Migratory Farm Labor" which was done under Truman. That was the guide for everybody. I was on the National Advisory Committee on Migratory Farm Labor. It was totally unofficial. Nobody asked for our advice. We met yearly and had a big public hearing on the plight of the migrant. We'd put out pamphlets and stuff. Steve Allen was on that board with Hollywood dignitaries and so on. Then that merged with the National Sharecroppers Fund, so I became a member of the National Sharecroppers Fund with Van Hecke and Frank Porter Graham and Eleanor Roosevelt and Benjamin Mays and Norman Thomas. So it was a real high-powered group and I was greatly honored to be on it. I've been on it ever since; ever since 1960. We meet and we have our problems. Right now we're working on the poultry farmers. They are licensed where they have contracts with Perdue and Holly Farms to raise the chicks and they deliver the chicks and then ten weeks later they come by and pick them up. They feed the chicks in the incubators and they spend almost two hundred thousand dollars to get all the equipment and set it up. And if they try to organize to protest something, they lose their contract. So we're trying to do something about that. That's one of the things. And then all the farmers now are losing their farms, the black farmers. And in North Hampton County up here before World War I they had two hundred black farmers. Now there are six black farmers. They can't get the loans. We bring suits against the Department of Agriculture for discriminating on the basis of race. When it's ready for trial they agree to give the loan to the guy, but by then the season is over, you know.

ANN MCCOLL:

Does the organization look at legal policy?

DANIEL POLLITT:

Yes, and we set up co-ops and we have irrigation equipment which we make available in case of a drought. We have a big co-op in cucumbers up in Danville, Virginia. We had violence in South Carolina for the shrimpers and we tried to encourage marketing outlets and things. It's a significant thing. We've sort of lost sight of the migrants. We look at the family farm to keep the family farmer on the farm. So it's a current thrust.