Helpful or not?

I found a children's book that is based on the childhood life of Owen Whitfield in the Mississippi Delta. It is fictional but I'm still wondering if it would be helpful with culture. Is it a bad idea to use a fictional story as a source or could this be useful to find out cultural details of the Mississippi Delta?

Delmo Homes

This is an example of the Delmo Homes that sharecroppers moved into after the government helped these homeless people. Here's a description from an issue in the "Preservation Issues" Volume 3 Number


"Construction on the Delmo Project houses began in 1940 and was completed in 1941. A total of 595 houses were constructed, with 30 to 80 houses in each village. The villages were segregated by race; four of the 10 - North Wyatt (Wilson City), North Lilbourn, Gobler, and South Wardell - were constructed for African Americans. Each village was constructed in a roughly circular loop around a central common area; Circle City near Grayridge in Stoddard County apparently derived its name from this arrangement.
The houses had four rooms with closets, built-in cabinets, storage space for fruits and vegetables, and were wired for electric lighting. Each house was furnished with one bedroom suite, a cooking stove, a coal heating stove, a dining table, its own privy, and an approximately one-acre plot for growing food. The total cost for each house was $800."

Narratives.

I found slave narratives written in the late 1930's, about the time period I am researching. It is interesting to read their opinions. Many of them say that slavey wasn't "all that bad" or that the present times are going pretty well too. It seems as though they can't imagine having equal opportunities. I want to compare these narratives with some of the 2nd generation share croppers thoughts.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/

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."

Video

Here is an interesting informational video about the strike of 1939.

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=146043

I am finding a lot of information but still having trouble finding primary sources.....

Paper Topic?

I've been looking into the topic of sharecropping. I found that there was a sharecroppers strike in 1939 in southeast Missouri. This was started when the Agricultural Adjustment Act was created from the New Deal. There was a loophole in this Act that allowed farmers to keep government money they owed to sharecroppers. The organizer, Owen H. Whitfield had a significant influence in the strike.

Butlercountyhistory.org says, "Owen Whitfield was a sharecropper and Vice President of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which was dedicated to creating better conditions for farm workers. Reverend Whitfield always said “Take your eye’s out of the sky, cause somebody is stealing your bread”. He convinced the other sharecroppers, that this demonstration would draw public attention to their plight. "


The Butler County history website has very interesting facts about how the community came about. Here it says, 
"Day after day, the sharecroppers remained by the roadside, huddling in tents, some with only old iron cook stoves to warm them. The demonstration began to attract national attention and to embarrass the state government. Reporters and photographers from major newspapers flocked to the Bootheel to follow the crisis. A professor of history at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri went to visit the demonstrators and came away horrified. When he described what he had seen to his classes, students gave up their spring prom and donated the money to help the sharecroppers. Activist Fannie Cook organized a committee of citizens to send relief to the protesters. Cook’s committee along with the Lincoln University students donated money so that the sharecroppers, led by Owen Whitfield, could buy a parcel of land: 93 acres near Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Several hundred both black and white sharecroppers moved to the site, which came to be known as “Cropperville”.


I think it would be interesting to write my research paper about a community that was built from a labor movement. I have not looked for primary sources or looked on libraries, so I don't know how much credible resources I will be able to find. I think this will be most challenging.