ALT Photo of James Talarico, who is running for U.S. Senate in Texas.

ALT Press photo of Owen Whitfield during the 1939 Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration. Whitfield was a visionary who fused economic justice, labor organizing and civil rights decades before the modern Civil Rights Movement. At a time when the Jim Crow system used racial division to keep wages low and labor weak, Whitfield engineered an unbreakable, multi-racial alliance. By proving that Black and white sharecroppers shared the same economic enemy, he shattered the Southern playbook of “strikebreaking by race.” He also revolutionized the role of the Black church in social movements. Today, Whitfield is remembered not just as a labor leader, but as a brilliant strategist who weaponized the visual power of protest to turn a hidden rural crisis into an unavoidable national reckoning. He established a model for cross-racial coalition building that remains a masterclass in labor organizing.