It’s 1935 and class war is brewing in Arkansas. Standing before 1,500 black and white sharecroppers, the radical Methodist minister Ward Rodgers thunders, “I can lead a mob to lynch any planter in Poinsett County.” The crowd erupts with applause.

These white and black sharecroppers who worked, lived, and died amid the vestiges of the Southern plantation system were no strangers to terror. The night before, a group of planters and deputy sheriffs had attacked an adult education class taught by Rodgers. The landowner class, the banks, the police, and an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan called the Nightriders had been engaged in a brutal crackdown on the workers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

Not to be outdone, the youthful and slender Harry Leland Mitchell rose to the stage. H. L. Mitchell was a union organizer and cofounder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU for short), one of the first interracial and most influential unions in the South. In the middle of the town square, Mitchell defended the Methodist minister, saying, “Ward Rodgers is staying at my house. If any bunch of sons of bitches with their heads in pillowcases come to my house, they are going to get the hell shot out of them.”