revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

9
Carolina and other areas of the South, the
issue was raised in Congress by
Thaddeus Stevens when he proposed the Homestead Act .
Congress failed to
pass the Homestead Act and for the most part the black peasantry remained
landless . Thus black people were economically distressed . After Reconstruction
was defeated with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, black
people were reintroduced into the economic system as sharecroppers in the
capitalist agriculture plantation system . 9 In the traditional period, before
the bourbon planter class re-consolidated its stranglehold over the
southern economy, black and white farmers organized a movement to fight for
the interests of small farmers . In the early 1870's, the Southern Farmers
Alliance was formed in Texas .
It encouraged black farmers to organize a
parallel organization and in December, 1886 in Houston, Texas, the Colored
Farmers Alliance developed .
The Colored Farmers Alliance often disagreed
with the white Farmers Alliance but worked with it for the most part in
combating the agri-capitalists and their allies . From the Populist movement,
the People's party was formed . The Populist revolt failed when its
major spokesmen, Ben Tillman in South Carolina and Tom Watson in Georgia,
capitulated to the bourbon planter class' ideology of racism . .10
Black people for the most part were used as
sharecroppers in the southern
plantation system until the beginnings of World War I when they were
drawn into the industrial labor force . The incorporation of a large percent
age into the industrial labor force changed the life style of black people
from agricultural to urban . The influx of large of numbers of black people
9 Ibid .
I0 Robert L . Allen, Reluctant Reformers (New York : Doubleda.y City,
New York, 1975), P . 79 .