#Cotton | King

[xtruss]

What Happened When a Fearless Group of Mississippi Sharecroppers Founded Their Own City

Strike City was born after one small community left the plantation to live on their own terms

— September 11, 2023 | NOVA—BPS

A tin sign demarcated the boundary of Strike City just outside Leland, Mississippi. Photo by Charlie Steiner

In 1965 in the Mississippi Delta, things were not all that different than they had been 100 years earlier. Cotton was still King—and somebody needed to pick it. After the abolition of slavery, much of the labor for the region’s cotton economy was provided by Black sharecroppers, who were not technically enslaved, but operated in much the same way: working the fields of white plantation owners for essentially no profit. To make matters worse, by 1965, mechanized agriculture began to push sharecroppers out of what little employment they had. Many in the Delta had reached their breaking point.

In April of that year, following months of organizing, 45 local farm workers founded the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. The MFLU’s platform included demands for a minimum wage, eight-hour workdays, medical coverage and an end to plantation work for children under the age of 16, whose educations were severely compromised by the sharecropping system. Within weeks of its founding, strikes under the MFLU banner began to spread across the Delta.

Five miles outside the small town of Leland, Mississippi, a group of Black Tenant Farmers led by John Henry Sylvester voted to go on strike. Sylvester, a tractor driver and mechanic at the A.L. Andrews Plantation, wanted fair treatment and prospects for a better future for his family. “I don’t want my children to grow up dumb like I did,” he told a reporter, with characteristic humility. In fact it was Sylvester’s organizational prowess and vision that gave the strikers direction and resolve. They would need both. The Andrews workers were immediately evicted from their homes. Undeterred, they moved their families to a local building owned by a Baptist Educational Association, but were eventually evicted there as well.

After two months of striking, and now facing homelessness for a second time, the strikers made a bold move. With just 13 donated tents, the strikers bought five acres of land from a local Black Farmer and decided that they would remain there, on strike, for as long as it took. Strike City was born. Frank Smith was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worker when he went to live with the strikers just outside Leland. “They wanted to stay within eyesight of the plantation,” said Smith, now Executive Director of the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington, D.C. “They were not scared.”

Life in Strike City was difficult. Not only did the strikers have to deal with one of Missississippi’s coldest winters in history, they also had to endure the periodic gunshots fired by white agitators over their tents at night. Yet the strikers were determined. “We ain’t going out of the state of Mississippi. We gonna stay right here, fighting for what is ours,” one of them told a documentary film team, who captured the strikers’ daily experience in a short film called “Strike City.” “We decided we wouldn’t run,” another assented. “If we run now, we always will be running.”

But the strikers knew that if their city was going to survive, they would need more resources. In an effort to secure federal grants from the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the strikers, led by Sylvester and Smith, journeyed all the way to Washington D.C. “We’re here because Washington seems to run on a different schedule,” Smith told congressmen, stressing the urgency of the situation and the group’s needs for funds. “We have to get started right away. When you live in a tent and people shoot at you at night and your kids can’t take a bath and your wife has no privacy, a month can be a long time, even a day…Kids can’t grow up in Strike City and have any kind of a chance.” In a symbolic demonstration of their plight, the strikers set up a row of tents across the street from the White House.

John Henry Sylvester, left, stands outside one of the tents strikers erected in Washington, D.C. in April 1966. Photo by Rowland Sherman

“It was a good, dramatic, in-your-face presentation,” Smith told American Experience, nearly 60 years after the strikers camped out. “It didn’t do much to shake anything out of the Congress of the United States or the President and his Cabinet. But it gave us a feeling that we’d done something to help ourselves.” The protestors returned home empty-handed. Nevertheless, the residents of Strike City had secured enough funds from a Chicago-based organization to begin the construction of permanent brick homes; and to provide local Black children with a literacy program, which was held in a wood-and-cinder-block community center they erected.

The long-term sustainability of Strike City, however, depended on the creation of a self-sufficient economy. Early on, Strike City residents had earned money by handcrafting nativity scenes, but this proved inadequate. Soon, Strike City residents were planning on constructing a brick factory that would provide employment and building material for the settlement’s expansion. But the $25,000 price tag of the project proved to be too much, and with no employment, many strikers began to drift away. Strike City never recovered.

Still, its direct impact was apparent when, in 1965, Mississippi schools reluctantly complied with the 1964 Civil Rights Act by offering a freedom-of-choice period in which children were purportedly allowed to register at any school of their choice. In reality, however, most Black parents were too afraid to send their children to all-white schools—except for the parents living at Strike City who had already radically declared their independence . Once Leland’s public schools were legally open to them, Strike City kids were the first ones to register. Their parents’ determination to give them a better life had already begun to pay dividends.

Smith recalled driving Strike City’s children to their first day of school in the fall of 1970. “I remember when I dropped them off, they jumped out and ran in, and I said, ‘They don't have a clue what they were getting themselves into.’ But you know kids are innocent and they’re always braver than we think they are. And they went in there like it was their schoolhouse. Like they belonged there like everybody else.”

[meggn]

🔩 👻 🕸️ 🧛

[painsleep]

Hastur - King In Yellow

[autistook]

'... and although it took courage, he finally asked for the hand of fair Rosie Cotton. It was the bravest thing he ever did.'

[ask-thesparedau]

Do you have any hc or stuff like that for macaque is spared au?

Spared!Macaque is a constant ‘work in progress’. Since info is so limited on him I tend to make up my own stuff! So as a preface, a lot of this isn’t canon:

1.) Macaque’s coat is thick and fluffy because of his origins upon a chilly mountain, where he grew up with his fellow snow monkeys. The constant howl of the wind kept his sensitive ears safe from the outside world in his formative years.

2.) His troop often socialized in the hot springs of their mountains. Because of this, Macaque grew up valuing the lushness of his fur, and general cleanliness.

3.) favorite food is sweet potatoes. Plums and peaches make his fur sticky

4.) he can read and write, and has been keeping notes on the jttw crew since the beginning

5.) a lover of the theatre, enjoys an audience. But is timid when he leaves the stage.

6.) He is self taught in all combative and magical aspects

If you have your own headcanons that you would like to add, feel free to send some suggestions ^^

[shiftythrifting]

Not sure if the doll is really cute or extremely creepy...

[heckyeahponyscans]

G1 My Little Pony comic #23, "A Pillow for Princess Pearl"

[jayday-art]

it would have been her.

[legomocfodder]

"I want to live! Take me with you, take me away from here!"

I've been planning and working on these minifigs and this diorama for a couple months now, and it's finally finished. This is one of my favorite scenes in One Piece and I wanted to find a way to recreate it in Lego

Luffy's gear 3, Zoro's 3 sword style, and Nami with her clima tact

Sniper King, Sanji's diable jambe, and Chopper with the 3 rumble balls (I wasn't going to try and make a brick built monster point)

Robin's Dos Fleur, and Spandam with the golden transponder snail

[hooked-on-elvis]

[where-our-stories-start]

Well, I'm back.

[beaft]

saw someone comparing james patterson and stephen king the other day and yeah, i guess they are technically similar - they're both writers of "lowbrow" genre fiction who churn out a million books a year and have an evergreen appeal to a certain type of middle-aged man. the main difference is that once you finish a stephen king book you can usually remember what happened in it, whereas once you finish a james patterson book it will vanish from your brain immediately after you turn the last page.

[butters-the-simp]

Yum yum eat up!

This took forever but I like how it turned out :3

[painsleep]

Brothers

[enigmaticspy]

[mokneydloaf]