They led an initially small racially mixed union of poor people within three years to a membership of some 30,000 tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

The first memory recorded in the autobiography of H. L. Mitchell — as he preferred to be named, although he also said, "Just call me Mitch"[5] — is his horror at witnessing the lynching of a Black delivery boy who was burned to death.

As a pre-teen, H. L. was the town paper boy, learning about the world by shouting out headlines, or making up plausible ones, to sell three Memphis newspapers.

In 1920, exposed to the Eugene V. Debs presidential campaign and a local supporter of it, who gave him books to read, Mitchell became a Socialist.

Initially inspired to learn about Darwinian evolution, because it was a subject of controversy in Tennessee, Mitchell began buying Little Blue Books, a habit he retained for years; thus gaining exposure to ancient and modern philosophers as well as the work of Marx, Engels, and the plays of Shakespeare.

[3] Shortly after graduating high school in 1924, Mitchell became a sharecropper near Ripley, Tennessee, about 13 miles SE of Halls.

[8] Wanting to know more about the Socialist movement, Mitchell planned an automobile drive to Washington, D. C. for the Continental Congress for Economic Reconstruction.

At stops on his journey, he met various activists, bringing one from Memphis to the Nashville home of Howard Kester, who was to become important in Mitchell's union activities.

At the Congress, which included some delegates' calls for an immediate socialistic takeover of the government (defused by the pragmatic leadership), Norman Thomas led a demonstration of some 500 meeting participants to the Cairo Hotel, which had refused to provide already paid-up rooms to the union leader A. Philip Randolph with his delegation of fellow African-American attendees.

Mitchell had written to the American Civil Liberties Union to find a lawyer for Smith, but without success, before hiring Carpenter.

[14] The piece in The Nation described some of the organized persecution suffered by the STFU, including evictions, violence, and the suppression of a muckraking Agricultural Adjustment Administration report roundly criticizing that agency.

In late January 1935, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration instructor Ward H. Rodgers was convicted of anarchy in Marked Tree and sentenced to six months in jail.

"[17] He also telegrammed local authorities, according to a February 1935 Associated Press report in the Washington Post; he demanded that Arkansas Governor Futrell provide "necessary steps for our protection," after four students from Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, responding to his telegram requesting help,[18] were set on by a mob as they neared a meeting site, and were escorted by police out of the county.

[20] At the beginning of 1936, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Mitchell's plan to contest the eviction of Arkansas tenants and sharecroppers prior to the distribution of government funds due on January 16.

The Atlanta Constitution carried an Associated Press story at the beginning of 1936 in which Mitchell announced that the focus of an STFU gathering in Little Rock, Arkansas would be "the working out of new methods of extending the organization through an appropriate program for all sections.

[28] In June, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Mitchell, accompanied by two officials of the National Committee on Rural Social Planning, Gardner Jackson and John P. Davis, met with Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, Democrat of Arkansas.

Mitchell hoped to distribute the film (and microfilms of STFU documents) to schools and libraries by purchase or rental, and he had worked up a list of 83 such institutions.

[31] He also toured with the film, including a free showing, followed by participation in a discussion, under the auspices of the Workers Defense League in New York City.

[33] Wade Rathke, the founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), had studied the STFU, and described finding Mitchell in 1973.