There actually was a time when white poor farmers in the south and black poor farmers in the south were banding their unions together. After the Civil War many poor whites began to resent the ruling whites and work together and sought alliances with freed blacks against them. Many of the policies of Reconstruction helped poor whites and freed slaves in homestead protections. The planter class wears puzzled at these interracial alliances as they were used to commanding both “colors” of poor people. They actually used the Klan in part to punish any whites banding together with the freed blacks in alliance against them. Any whites supporting the Republican Party also experienced violence and threats against them (the Republican Party at the time was pro-civil rights and freed the slaves under republican President Lincoln).

So Confederate general Butler sought to attack the congressional committee investigating the Klan, controlled and funded by rich whites as a political weapon. He felt the Congressional committee was undermining the elite planters efforts to maintain control. They were able to weaken the Republican Party support and when Reconstruction ended, so did the investigations into the Klan controlled by elites as well as the policy for homesteading that supported poor whites and freed blacks from claiming farm land to be self supportive and building wealth through owning and managing their own farms with their own labor.

As a result, sharecropping forced blacks to work on other peoples lands, making them “share” the crops they harvested for elite whites, who had complete control of the selling and distribution of crops like cotton. The wholesalers and distributors made the real money and by land depravation blacks were cut off from owning and wholesaling, meaning they were basically re-enslaved, living in the shacks on the white owners land that should have been theirs, paying off the white owners land, and paying rent to the white owner as well as shopping at the white company store at exorbitant prices where they continued to compile debt, which kept them enslaved. The elite planters often put poor whites in charge over the black poor, re-creating that system established during slavery of having a white slave driver. This system continued for some time, even though it began to “wear out” because of mass black migration during the first and second world wars. One the last elite sharecropper plantations was owned by Senator Eastland of Mississippi in the 1960s where poor blacks continued to live in dilapidated shacks with no heat, water, or electricity. Senator Eastland’s plantation was for cotton where the poor blacks lived and work, amassing thus no assets themselves, but amassing assets value of the land and structure for him. They made him richer through their labor, both in money and land. They were basically slaves the Senator owned.

Thus, white southern elites did weaponize wealth and political connections in the South to destroy policy that worked against their interest and hire white plantation managers and Klansmen to terrorize whites from banding with poor blacks. The black Southern Tenant Farmers Union is another good example that formed in 1934 in Arkansas, but I’ll leave to you to Google.

Thanks for raising the issue and provoking discussion.