John Handcox was a Black sharecropper—a tenant farmer who paid for his rent by giving the landowner part of his crop—from Brinkley, Arkansas. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he decided to join the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Arkansas sharecroppers joined the union in part to assure they would acquire their fair share of the allotted funds doled out by the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). When the AAA instead gave its funding to the planters, the STFU’s membership shot up in 1934 and 1935, even though it was run by the Socialist Party and included many communists among its organizers. Even more critical in its formation was the fact that the union was integrated: poor whites and Blacks marched and worked together to demand their fair share of federal money, an unheard-of alliance in the Jim Crow south that frightened the planters even more than the union’s leftist politics.