ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two instances where class analysis was given legitimacy by tobacco growers. In the first, the Farmers’ Alliance in the late 1800s, race was partially ignored and the structures of dependent development and the class roots of farm poverty were directly addressed. In the second, Kentucky’s Black Patch War of 1904-9, tobacco growers had further succumbed to the racial representations of labour control. The Farmers’ Alliance was founded in Texas in 1878 and spread like wildfire, with local chapters being organized in community after community. The Democratic white power structure outside the Alliance controlled the election process and rigged fraudulent wins for its candidates after Alliance candidates, either within the Democratic party or as third-party Populists, began winning elections. The power of the Alliance, with its interracial cooperation, is obscured; films such as Mississippi Burning obscure black-white co-operation by presenting the Civil Rights Movement as one in which whites acted for the benefit of passive blacks.
