Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America
While living in Winchester he became active in organizing the African-American laborers and sharecroppers and formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Hill based his association on black fraternal organizations, the international trade union movement, and Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League. Hill intended to use the organization to force landowners to pay tenant farmers their full shares and establish union-owned farms.
During the summer of 1919 Hill encouraged hundreds of African-American sharecroppers and sawmill workers to join his organization. Hill had particularly success amongst African-American veterans of World War I who were embittered over their post-war treatment. During that summer, Hill organized union chapters in the small towns of Hoop Spur, Ratio, Elaine, Old Town, Countiss, Ferguson, and Mellwood.
Read more about this topic: Robert L. Hill
Famous quotes containing the words progressive, farmers, household, union and/or america:
“The self ... might be regarded as a sort of citadel of the mind, fortified without and containing selected treasures within, while love is an undivided share in the rest of the universe. In a healthy mind each contributes to the growth of the other: what we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of ourself. On the other hand, it is only on the basis of a substantial self that a person is capable of progressive sympathy or love.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Without the power of the Industrial Union behind it, Democracy can only enter the State as the victim enters the gullet of the Serpent.”
—James Connolly (1870–1916)
“When I think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, summering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side,—I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)