Owen Whitfield (October 14, 1891 - August 1965) was a preacher and leader of the 1939 Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration, where both black and white homeless sharecropping families camped out on the side of the road as a means of getting the government’s attention on the vast poverty and injustice of tenants. He was also a union organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union which was “dedicated to the complete abolition of tenantry and wage slavery in all its forms”. Through his use of applied religion, Whitfield mobilized his audiences and exhorted them to stop thinking of the afterlife and instead focus on living and practicing their faith. He is noted for preaching to his audiences: “take your eyes out of the sky because someone is stealing your bread”.
