Howard Kester

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Howard Kester (1904–1977) was an American preacher, organizer, and activist based in the South. He is noted for his work organizing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) beginning in 1934.^[1] His work was inspired by a radical version of Christianity called the Social Gospel, influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr among others, as well as a Marxist critique of the Southern economy. A white Southerner, he believed that it was important to end racial strife by uniting poor black and whites around a common cause.

His views on race had been influenced as a college student by a tour of 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 racial justice in the United States: the NAACP, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and the Committee on Economic and Racial Justice. He investigated the Claude Neal case.

In 1936, he published Revolt Among the Sharecroppers, a short work on behalf of the STFU. It was reprinted by Arno in 1969, and issued in a new edition in 1997 by the University of Tennessee Press.