The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum occupies the Mitchell-East Building in Tyronza, which was H. L. Mitchell's dry-cleaning shop and Clay East's service station in the 1930s. Both men helped found the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, and the building served as its unofficial headquarters. Eleven white and seven African American people formed the union in July 1934 at Sunnyside School near Tyronza, to organize against the tenant farming system.
The union grew until its leaders claimed about 35,000 members in Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi and Oklahoma. It was unusual for its time because Black and white members, and women and men, held leadership positions, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls it a forerunner of later labor and civil rights movements. It declined through leaders' power struggles and then through mechanization in the early 1950s that ended tenant farming, and only sixty people attended the 1941 convention. It went out of existence in the 1960s.
Arkansas State University restored the building's 1930s front and opened the museum on October 6, 2006. Photographs follow Delta cotton from planting to shipment on the Mississippi, cotton sacks and farm tools show a tenant's work, and recorded oral histories hold the voices of planters and tenants. The museum also plays protest songs written by union members and shows copies of paintings by the Delta artist Carroll Cloar. It joined the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience in 2019.
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