Important People

Thanks to help to Professor Sullivan I have found much more information! Currently I'm trying to focus on important people that were apart of the strike in 1939. The 3 most important I've found have been Owen Whitfield, who was basically in charge of the strike, Fannie Cook, and Marcus "Al" Murphy. 

Fanny Cook, a Jewish woman from St. Charles, Missouri, played a key role in the fight. She was a writer, her first book published in 1938 about a middle-class white woman who fought to help minorities in the labor force. The story was fictional, but provided an insight into Cook's opinion about labor issues. In 1939, Cook stayed with a local family who in the Bootheel to work on her next novel. She found the experience enriching but hated what she saw. This is what I found from an article "St. Louis and the Sharecroppers: Urban Connections to a Rural Protest."

"According to Cook, state police "dumped" the roadside demonstrators at camps in various locations in the Bootheel after clearing their tents from the roadside. In Charleston, they lived in stalls made of cardboard boxes, propped up against bare walls, and they had no running water or privies. Women gave birth without medical care. Others lived out in the country in similar circumstances. As a doctor's wife, Cook lamented that sick people lay in makeshift beds in rough camps with no one to determine what ailed them. Although she went to the Bootheel to obtain material for a novel, Cook became personally involved in the sharecroppers' cause. Later, she told a reporter for the Post-Dispatch that the poor people of Southeast Missouri had become her friends. "When people become your friends," she said, "you want to do something for them."