With the assistance of American Communist Party organizers, Alabama black sharecroppers and tenant farmers created the SCU in 1931. Nate Shaw, a Tallapoosa County cropper, recalled that one organizer “was a colored fella ... He wanted us to organize and he was with us a whole lot of the time holdin meetins with us” (Rosengarten, 2000, p. 297).

The members resisted economic and racial injustice. Meeting secretly, they discussed how to fight cheating, lien foreclosures, peonage (jail for debt), and lynching and how to get a nine-month school term and a county bus for their children. But news of the meetings leaked and the authorities retaliated. The sheriff and Ku Klux Klansmen killed more than a dozen members. They whipped many; arrested, convicted, and jailed others. Shaw served twelve years in the state prison. SCU went underground, recruited, and spread. It had a membership between 10,000 and 12,000 in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi by 1936.