Biography
Wayne Cryts was a southeast-Missouri soybean farmer who became a national symbol of the early-1980s farm crisis after he was jailed for defying a federal court in a protest over grain-elevator bankruptcy law — a law that stripped farmers of ownership of crops they had stored if the elevator company went bankrupt. In February 1981, more than 3,000 farmers rallied in New Madrid, Missouri to support him, and that July Cryts and others removed his soybeans from the bankrupt Bernie, Missouri elevator. When the bankruptcy court demanded he name who had helped him, Cryts refused, and on April 28, 1982 a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge jailed him for civil contempt in Russellville, Arkansas under an indefinite sentence. His jailing drew national attention to the farm movement, and Congress later changed the bankruptcy law in response to his case.
