Transcript: Ned Cobb: Fighting for the Farmer

CLINTON ADAMS: Poor white people and black people was pretty much in the same boat, because all they was to them people is somebody to walk behind a horse.

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN: In their material lives, in what they had to eat, in the kind of work they did, in what they wore, and the houses they lived, white and black tenant farmers and sharecroppers were closer than any other two groups of people you could imagine in America.

EMMA MAY: We didn’t know anything about what you call it uh, discrimination or whatever. We didn’t know anything about anything, because we was all like a family. Every time we’d look out the door, it was a white child coming with a bucket. And we said, mama, there comes so and so with a thank-you-ma'am bucket. And she and my daddy never said don’t. And my mama would give you her head if she thought she could get it back on her shoulders. [pause] Well, daddy was a different person. He...he didn’t let nobody run over him.

NARRATION: Emma May's daddy was Ned Cobb, an uneducated black sharecropper who prospered. Helped by a literate wife and renowned stamina, he bought new acres of good farmland, mules – even a second automobile.

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN: He loved the land. It was clear how much he loved...he loved the work that he did. He was a farmer. No schooling. He happened to spend his life walking behind a mule and a plow, but he had a genius. He had a great mind. He was able to make sense of the things as he said, things that touched him.

NARRATION: But being a black landowner in Tallapoosa County, Alabama was dangerous. Black success frightened whites.

VOICE OF NEDD COBB: "They looked hard, they didn't stop lookin'. They don't like to see a nigger with too much. They don't like it one bit. White people was afraid. Afraid the money would make the nigger act too much like his own man." Ned Cobb

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN: In a sense, the white upper classes, white ruling classes, have ruled by dividing white and black working people from each other. And Ned was aware of that history, and that history helped fuel his own opposition.

NARRATION: In 1931, Ned Cobb would find a way to express his opposition to the system. The American Communist Party, which had been gaining support from a struggle to achieve better working conditions for northern workers, had come south.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN: In the South, I mean the Communist Party was the only political organization that took a stand against segregation and for racial equality and acted on it, and embraced the struggle at a very basic level.

NARRATION: In of aggressive opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, the party intensified its efforts to recruit Alabama farmers into a union called the Sharecroppers Union. The Communists were astonished as six thousand farmers responded.

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN: Ned associated the union with, in fact, the Yankees who had come down in the period of the Civil War and just after in Reconstruction to free the slaves. And he said that his grandmother had told him that the Yankees had come down and started the job, and somebody would come and finish it. And when he met the union…the organizers of the Sharecroppers Union, he thought the prophesy is filled, the time has come.

SHIRLEY DEAN RAE: He had joined the union, and he was the president, he was the spokesperson for the union. And he felt that it was his obligation to protect the people in that area.

NARRATION: Several months after joining the union, Ned Cobb took his gun and went to the home of his neighbor, Cliff James, to confront the sheriff who was enforcing a foreclosure on Cliff James' land.

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN: And Ned says, please go back to the people who instructed you and tell them the situation. He will pay them what he owes them. And the sheriff said, “No, we’re going to take what he has got this morning. Go...go in there and get that mule.” And Ned said, “If you take it, you’ll take it over my dead body.” And the sheriff says, “Well, back out," he says, "back out.” He says...and then the sheriff turns to him and says, “You already done said enough for me to me done killed you.” And Ned says, “You want to kill me, kill me. There’s nothing but the air between us. Nothing but the air.” He had on a long coat and he had kept that gun hidden in his coat. A shot is fired. Shooting begins. And Ned pulls out that Smith and Wesson and he says, “I unloaded it.” He said, “And it sang to me like a baby.” Most of those shots hit the trees. And as Ned steps back into the house, he receives a...a uh shotgun load, a buckshot, in his backside.

EMMA MAY: And my daddy had on a pair of brand new overalls, and there wasn’t a place on his overalls that my mother could patch. It was just you know they’re white inside and blue on the outside, and they was just shot up. But my daddy was hoppin’. They tell me, my daddy said "well pour it in me."

THEODORE ROSENGARTEN: Ned was taken to jail where he languished for several months until he was brought to trial for attempted murder. Now, the sheriffs had tried to murder him. But in fact, he and other members of the union were charged with attempted murder. And Ned was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in the state penitentiary.

SHIRLEY DEAN RAE: My grandfather was courageous. He was courageous and all he was trying to do was make life better for everyone. Not only his family, not only his brothers, and his sisters, and for his wife and his children, but he wanted to see life better for everyone, whether they were white or black. And if he had to spend the twelve years in jail, he would say, so be it. I’ll do it for it to be a difference.