Owen Whitfield (October 14, 1891 - August 1965)[1] was a preacher and leader of the 1939 Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration, where both black and white homeless sharecropping families camped out on the side of the road as a means of getting the government's attention on the vast poverty and injustice of tenants.
[3] Through his use of applied religion, Whitfield mobilized his audiences and exhorted them to stop thinking of the afterlife and instead focus on living and practicing their faith.
Unlike the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which specialized in agricultural and manual labor education, Okolona also taught grammar, nursing, chemistry, music, and English literature.
[10] In addition, the principles of the Okolona Industrial School, which emphasized the importance of civic service, also influenced his desire to preach.
He made ties with both blacks and whites, including Thad Snow who was a “radical” planter who often advocated for the rights of the tenants in the Bootheel.
[16] Throughout his involvement in the STFU, Whitfield opposed strikes and urged the sharecroppers to use the power of the government to obtain victories.
They viewed it as an evil since the planters would keep the entire checks for themselves by explaining to their tenants that they were switching from employing sharecroppers to day laborers.
Because Whitfield preferred bringing change through the government, he organized the mass demonstration of evicted sharecroppers along the 60 and 61 U.S Highways in the Bootheel.
[20] By this time, Owen Whitfield, the preacher and union organizer had gained nationwide recognition as the man who “woke up the cotton slaves” in the Bootheel, Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century.