In January 1939, two thousand black and white sharecroppers in Southeast Missouri left the Bootheel cotton plantations where they lived and worked and gathered with their families and few belongings along two state highways to protest the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, a New Deal law under President Franklin Roosevelt that paid farmers subsidies to reduce planting and livestock but allowed plantation owners to exploit a loophole, withhold the sharecroppers' portion, fine them, and replace them with day laborers. Owen H. Whitfield, an African American minister, sharecropper, and vice-president of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, planned and led the demonstration to draw attention to their conditions. As protesters endured hunger and cold in tents beside the highways, the American Red Cross refused aid, calling the protest a man-made disaster, and after national reporters and photographers brought embarrassing attention to the crisis, the governor sent state troopers to remove the demonstrators to isolated places such as a levee, swampland, and a church yard. Relief efforts followed when Lorenzo Greene of Lincoln University in Jefferson City visited the demonstrators and inspired students to give up their spring prom and donate the money, and in St. Louis, Frannie Cook organized citizens to send help. The next summer, Cook's committee and Lincoln University students helped the remaining sharecroppers, still led by Whitfield, buy ninety-three acres near Poplar Bluff, where several hundred black and white sharecroppers built a community called Cropperville. Though the sheriff warned of hostility from the surrounding all-white community and Whitfield had to hide in Thad Snow's barn before fleeing to St. Louis, no bloodshed occurred, and the settlers began farming and building homes despite early hunger, sickness, and death, eventually establishing a school, church, gardens, and cemetery. Within a year, the protest had helped prompt a conference involving the governor, Whitfield, planters, and officials, and the federal government, through the Farm Security Administration, created the Delmo Homes communities, ten Bootheel villages for sharecroppers needing housing. Cropperville later declined as residents left for World War II and better jobs and Whitfield took a new church position, but the roadside protest brought state and national change and helped sharecroppers build better lives for themselves and their children.