Howard Kester

Howard Kester was an American preacher, organizer, and activist, most known for his work organizing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) beginning in 1934. His work was inspired by a radical version of Christianity called the Social Gospel, influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr among others, and a Marxist critique of the Southern economy. A white Southerner himself, he firmly believed that the only way to create a new "Eden" was to end racial strife by uniting poor black and whites around a common cause. His views on race began when, as a college student, he toured Poland with the YMCA. After visiting a Jewish ghetto he began to see a parallel between Europe's treatment of Jews and America's treatment of blacks. Kester worked with numerous organizations throughout his life that sought equality in the United States: NAACP, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and the Committee on Economic and Racial Justice. In 1936 he published Revolt Among the Sharecroppers on behalf of the STFU.

Biography

Early Life and School

Howard Kester was born in 1904 and spent the first twelve years of his life living in the outskirts of Martinsville, Virginia. His Father, a tailor, moved the family to Beckley, West Virginia; a coal mining town. Industrial growth in Beckley intensified the gap between the working and middle class. African Americans were drawn to the area in search of work, and as a consequence the Ku Klux Klan grew in influence, Kester's own Father joined. This environment gave Kester first hand knowledge of class and race inequality.

During the 1920s, Kester worked as a Christian activist for the [YMCA] and the [Fellowship of Reconciliation]. In the late 1920s, Kester enrolled in the divinity school of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Under the partnership and influence of Alva Taylor, Kester and other Christian Socialists, they formed what historian Anthony Dunbar calls a "radical gospel" that sought to improve conditions in the South, devoted to focus on the dispossessed croppers, textile and mine workers, and unemployed of the South, who were suffering from the economic collapse of the Great Depression.

External links

• Oral History Interviews with Howard Kester [1], [2] from Oral Histories of the American South