Reel 29

Scope and Contents As David Burgess reported to Mitchell early in the month, the Farm Security Administration had decided to sell at auction the Delmo Labor Homes Project in Southeast Missouri which had been built five years earlier to house evicted tenant families (8). An intensive campaign got underway immediately to save the Delmo homes, a campaign which might best be followed in the correspondence and reports of David Burgess. On this subject, see also Mitchell to Alfred Baker Lewis (19), the Minutes of...

Scope and Contents Efforts to save the Delmo Labor Homes were focused on Congress, as the STFU lobbied for legislation which would direct the FSA to sell the homes to the residents at a reasonable price. The members of Congress most directly involved in the campaign were Senators Frank P. Briggs of Missouri and William Langer of North Dakota, as well as Congressmen Orville Zimmerman of Missouri and Frank Hook of Michigan. The key documents include: a "Fact Sheet" on Delmo by David Burgess (3); the FSA to...

Scope and Contents Much of the day-to-day correspondence during May concerns the recruitment of 300 black college students for summer jobs at the Deerfield Packing Co. in New Jersey; see especially a press release on the project (30) and a "Report on Student Workers", which provides a breakdown on the number of students sent by individual colleges (n.d.). Hopes for saving the Delmo Homes were centered on an "Independent Tenants' Committee" of prominent St. Louis citizens which planned to buy the homes and...

Scope and Contents From the Collection: Consist of correspondence, reports, ledgers, legal documents, leaflets, printed material, photographs, and newspapers published by the union. These document the activities of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union from its origins through its transformations into the National Farm Labor Union in 1946 and the National Agriculture Workers Union in 1952, and through its merger with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union in 1960. The records also contain selected materials from the Socialist Party...