Originally set up in July 1934 during the Great Depression, the STFU was founded to help sharecroppers and tenant farmers get better arrangements from landowners.

Part of the New Deal, the AAA was a program to reduce production in order to increase prices of commodities; landowners were paid subsidies, which they were supposed to pass on to their tenants.

The program was designed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help revive the United States' agricultural industry and to recharge the depressed economy.

In order to alleviate this sector, the federal government under the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, through the New Deal, started economic incentives to reduce the production output of plantations; thereby, decreasing the number of sharecroppers and farmers needed in the fields.

However, it never reached a formal bargaining position because plantation owners used violence and intimidation against the STFU leadership and its members;[5] for instance, the union's president, William H. Stultz, was arrested and threatened with death, and the visiting Director of western Arkansas's Commonwealth College, Lucien Koch, was seized at an STFU meeting, beaten and jailed.

Two African Americans, E. B. McKinney and N. W. Webb, were chosen to go to Washington to denounce the continual eviction of tenant farmers.

Cotton planters wanted to pay forty cents per one-hundred pounds that fall season of 1935 but the union, under H. L. Mitchell's direction, demanded one dollar.

[7] In 1939, STFU activists organized protests by hundreds of cotton sharecroppers in the Bootheel district of southeastern Missouri, alleging there were mass evictions of tenants by landlords who did not wish to share federal AAA checks with them.

The Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency, responded by providing low-cost rental housing for 500 cropper families.

[8] During World War II, the STFU leadership recommended its members find work outside of the plantation fields of Arkansas.

After the end of the alliance, UCAPAWA decided to leave the agricultural field and concentrate its labor campaign on food-processing workers.

It began to assist agricultural workers to allied various organizations from the South in order to create a stronger Popular Front.

The STFU benefited from its association with the Communist Party because the organizations in the Front supported each other in protests and fights against plantation owners.

By separating themselves from the Communist Party, the union maintained its alliance between white and black workers and members, which was crucial to its identity and program.

Once again, Mitchell, East, and liberal members of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration observed that this program had negative effects on land workers, leaving many unemployed.

Furthermore, Clay East was able to promote socialist ideas within Tyronza through his leadership position by distribution its most successful journal, American Guardian, edited by Oscar Ameringer.

However, when the STFU reached large towns, racial antagonisms were prominent since interracial relations were less frequent in these highly populated regions.

In these towns the STFU created black and white localities, with their racially respective organizers to gain confidence from their union members.