Sharecropping | Slavery By Another Name Bento | PBS Additional Languages Sharecropping After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping. Sharecropping is a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could, and ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely to leave for other opportunities. In the South, after the Civil War, many black families rented land from white owners and raised cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. In many cases, the landlords or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. At that time, the tenant and landlord or merchant would settle up, figuring out who owed whom and how much High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next.

Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or even illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord, or prevented sharecroppers from moving if they were indebted to their landlord. Approximately two-thirds of all sharecroppers were white, and one third were black. Though both groups were at the bottom of the social ladder, sharecroppers began to organize for better working rights, and the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union began to gain power in the 1930s. The Great Depression, mechanization, and other factors lead sharecropping to fade away in the 1940s. Sharecropping is an arrangement with a land owner who rents out their land to a ... | Hacker News randomdata 1943 days ago | parent | favorite | on: I was once a Facebook fool Sharecropping is an arrangement with a land owner who rents out their land to a farmer for the payment of a percentage of the crop instead of cash. It reduces the risk for the farmer because they only have to pay based on what they are able to grow instead of a fixed amount as seen in most cash-rent arrangements.

The landowner stands to lose if the crop is a failure, but can make more if the crop is a success. The term may also come with some historical meaning, but that is what sharecropping has come to mean today. Edit: Down vote me if you wish, but that is what sharecropping is in the rural community. Speaking as a farmer, sharecropping is a great way to access land in a low-risk way. I don't know why sharecropping land is seen as a negative. raganwald 1943 days ago I accept that in response to abuses, the practice may have evolved over time. However, that does not in any way diminish the value of the metaphor, because the vast majority of people who encounter the word “sharecropper” think of the kind of farmer who can be evicted after harvest and often were. Further to that, I strongly suspect that most of those who are aware that the practice has evolved since those draconian times read the metaphor and immediately grasp that the metaphor refers to the historical meaning of the word and can go on to extract value from it without belabouring a pedantic point.

I will go further and challenge you: When you read the above posts, were you unaware of the historical behaviour of landlords and sharecroppers? Is it news to you that this practice was so abused that the word has pejorative overtones even though the practice may have evolved in modern times? Or is it simply that you wish to share with us the interesting news that times have changed for farming sharecroppers even if they haven’t for developers on proprietary platforms? randomdata 1943 days ago The term computer used to mean a person who sat at a desk doing mathematical calculations. When someone talks about their Amazon computing cluster, I don't picture a huge office building full of people putting pen to paper, crunching numbers all day long, even though that is exactly what computing cluster would have meant at one point in time. When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today, not hundreds of years ago. I am familiar of the stories of "sharecroppers" of the past, but sharecropping does not refer to those people anymore. Words are evolving all the time and present day usage is what is important when communicating with others.

mbreese 1943 days ago When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today Only people who know that this term is still being used today and in what context. I suspect that most people don't know this, and will revert to the historical meaning. noahc 1943 days ago The term sharecropper has two meanings. The first one is the modern day practice. "He's a sharecropper because he uses share cropping in his business" refers to the modern day agricultural practice. Whatever economic system they use is irrelevant. In almost all other cases, particularly in regards to Technology, it refers to the old school practice of share cropping and is using it as such. Present day usage has nothing to do with it. It is all about context. If 80% of HN agree that sharecropper means X, then it means X. Sharecropper in this sense has become a piece of jargon among business and technology folks. kragen 1942 days ago The old-school practice is the same as the modern-day practice: the landlord rented his land to tenant farmers in exchange for a share of their crop.

randomdata's statement: > In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward. is just as true of sharecropping in 1911 as of sharecropping in 2011. The difference he draws between sharecropping on a farm and sharecropping on a web site doesn't make sense, though. djeikyb 1943 days ago In USAmerican schools, children are taught that sharecropping was an unethical farming practice (ab)used by former slave owners. Perhaps modern day farmers are aware of the modern sharecropping practice, but it certainly isn't taught in schools, nor is it in the common experience. saturn 1943 days ago I also interpreted the word as randomdata did. I think this is an American thing. When I think of sharecropping it makes me think of farmers under a landlord in medieval England or something. Not a great power dynamic but the word isn't all that negative, it just emphasises (when used as a metaphor elsewhere) that you work and stay at the landlord's pleasure.

I've heard americans use the word before but didn't realise it came loaded with all this historical meaning from the slavery era, turning it into a highly negative concept. On "Sharecroppers" On "Sharecroppers" Matthew Lessig Sterling Brown intended to include "Sharecropper" as part of the "Cotton South" section of his collection No Hiding Place (where it appears in a slightly different version under the title "Sharecroppers"), but could not find a publisher for the manuscript. "Sharecropper" was first published in 1939 in Get Organized: Stories and Poems about Trade Union People, one in a series of "literary pamphlets . . . written for members of trade union and other progressive organizations" put out by International Publishers, a New York publishing house affiliated with the Communist Party. Though IP achieved fairly wide distribution of their publicationsmarketing them through "a network of left-wing and CP-related bookstores and through the movement apparatus itself" (Williams 373)probably very few southern sharecroppers ever read or heard the poem.

Many sharecroppers, white and black, could not read; of those who could, many would not have been able to afford even the ten-cent cost of a copy (most sharecroppers did their "spending" on credit at stores that were owned by their landlords and that rarely, if ever, sold any of IPs titles). Furthermore, the two "progressive organizations" in the rural south that might have been able to smuggle copies of Get Organized to their impoverished membersthe Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) and the Alabama Sharecroppers Unionwere both in disarray by 1939, in part because of their affiliations with the United Cannery, Agricultural, and Packing Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a CIO trade union. Thus, the likely audience for Browns poem would have been members of urban, industrial trade unions or other progressive organizations and individuals associated with Americas cultural Left. We should, then, read Browns poem as speaking on behalf of southern sharecroppers in the rural south, who lived relatively distant from the centers of trade unionism, progressive politics, and literary culture in the Depression years.

This is not to say that the sharecropper was a "forgotten man." By 1939, sharecropping had become a cause c�l�bre of Depression culture, featured in journalistic expos�s, the documentary photography of the Farm Security Administration, March of Time newsreels, Hollywood films, Broadway plays, and popular novels. As part of this broader discourse, Browns poem draws attention to the plight of the sharecropper and tries to generate sympathy for unions in sore need of political allies and financial assistance. In making his sharecropper a figure of interracial union solidarity, Brown dramatizes the crucial struggles of sharecropper unions in the segregated South. The very title of the poem is fraught with the complex history of race and class relations in the plantation economy. Economically and socially, the term "sharecropper" signified one of the lowest rungs on the Southern agricultural "ladder," the allegedly meritocratic hierarchy of agrarian status that rose from wagehand through sharecropper, share tenant, cash tenant, and owner. Cash tenants were essentially renters. They supplied mules and tools as well as their labor and could claim ownership of their crop.

They typically owed their landlord a third of the proceeds from their cotton crop but retained more independence than sharecroppers in managing their allotted land and the right to market the cotton they raised. Sharecroppers, on the other hand, were little more than wage laborers who, at years end, earned half the value of the cotton they raised. They had no legal claim to this crop and were subject to greater supervision of their labor than cash tenants. Thus, tenants maintained a greater degree of autonomy and more closely resembled independent owners. As Alex Lichtenstein explains, "The further down the agricultural ladder one went, the more dependent one became upon the landlord for management, housing, tools, seed, fertilizer, mules, and everything else, and the more of the crop went to the landowner for both rent and to pay back cash advances made at the beginning of the season" (28). Historically, sharecropping emerged during Reconstruction as a "sequel to slavery," a means of luring recently freed slaves back to laboring in the Southern cotton fields.

While granting freedpeople the right to work in family units rather than gang labor, sharecropping denied their ambitions for farm ownership, for "forty acres and a mule," instead reinscribing Southern blacks into the dependent relations of (white) plantation paternalism. In a land still ideologically governed by the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent smallhold farmer, or yeoman, as the guarantor of republican freedom, farm ownership "defined the boundaries of yeoman manhood and served as the master trope of agrarian whiteness" (Foley 141). Thus, sharecroppers bore several stigmas. First, in a culture founded on white supremacy, sharecropping represented a form of agricultural labor traditionally coded as black. Second, by the Jeffersonian standard, sharecroppers represented dependent and therefore unmanly laborers rather than independent farmers. Third, working at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, sharecroppers were viewed as failed farmers, and even biologically inferior types (white and black), mere "human debris." As one 1930s visitor to the South observed, "the word sharecropper itself has come to be used as a term of contempt" (qtd. in Lichtenstein 34).

Had Browns poem been published in 1929, its title would have likely evoked traditional images of the Souths black "peasantry" from most readers. But by 1939, America had been scandalized by the belated recognition that over the preceding decades millions of whites had lost their farms and fallen into tenancy. Thanks to the efforts of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, the photographic images of the Farm Security Administration, novels such as Erskine Caldwells Tobacco Road, and numerous journalistic expos�s and documentary books, the public face of the sharecropper had paled considerably and the term "sharecropper" had acquired sensational tones. Two publications, both capitalizing on the 30s vogue for confessional documentary, featured the title "I Was a Sharecropper": white novelist Harry Harrison Krolls 1937 autobiography and a 1939 Farm Security Administration pamphlet (with a cover photograph of what seems to be an axe-toting, white frontiersman) promoting Federal relief efforts in the rural South.

By the late 1930s, the sharecropper was established in the national imagination as a contested figure of racial hybridity, class tension, and regional conflict, a figure whose homely appeals to Americas ideal of the family homestead competed with his stark display of Americas history of racial oppression and class conflict. Dorothea Langes "Hoe Culture" suggests the racially unsettled and ideologically conflicted character of the sharecropper in the public imagination and the public domain. Langes photo, taken in Alabama in 1936 for the Farm Security Administration, presents a begrimed Southern farmer whose racial identity, thanks to Langes headless framing of the shot, remains tellingly ambiguous. Instead, Lange directs our gaze to her subjects calloused hands, tattered clothes, and pre-modern tools, foregrounding the desperate poverty of Alabamas rural proletarians while championing the quiet dignity of their farm labor.

"Hoe Culture" evokes Jeffersons famous celebration of the agrarian ideal"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people"to both ennoble its subject and to indict the economic system that betrays such an American icon. As part of the public domain (FSA photographs were and are public property), "Hoe Culture" has lent itself to various racial readings. For example, the first image below (Fig. 1), taken from the Library of Congresss "American Memory" website, shows what is arguably a dirt-covered white farmer. The second image (Fig. 2), taken from Richard Wrights 12 Million Black Voices (1941), significantly darkens the image. In, 12 Million Black Voices, Langes photograph serves as the frontispiece to Wrights chapter on African-American history, "Our Strange Birth," graphically suggesting a point of origin for a narrative of "three hundred years of oppression in America" (Wright 11). Fig. 1 Fig. 2 With this cultural history in mind, we might begin reading Browns poem by asking, what is the racial identity of the poems protagonist?

The safest answer is that we cant say for sure. Arguably, the poems strongest lexical indicator of race is the dialectical "dis" in its concluding lines. Though Brown is well known for his black dialect poetry, "Sharecropper" conserves black dialect for the direct discourse of its martyred heros dying words, thereby postponing a race conscious reading until it can be subsumed within the poems class conscious closing appeal. Some readers may argue that the lynch drama developed in the poems first stanza strongly suggests that Browns protagonist is black. But while black members of sharecropper unions did bear the greater part of anti-union violence, whites were commonly attacked as well. In fact, in January of 1936, Time magazine covered the story of the white minister (and union organizer) Rev. Claude Williams and his female companion, "Memphis socialite" Willie Sue Blagden, who were flogged by planter-paid thugs in eastern Arkansas while investigating the disappearance of a local black sharecropper. Still, by trading in lynch violence, "Sharecropper" risks opening deeply rooted racial divisions at the same time that it seeks to forge interracial class bonds.

Overwhelmingly, such violence in the South was perpetrated by whites on blacks in the name of white racial superiority and solidarity. The poems mob of landlord, sheriff, and "riff-raff," while not explicitly identified by race, conforms to the conventional white cast of Southern lynchings and suggests the brutal defense of white privilege celebrated in popular white supremacist fictions such as D. W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation (1915) and excoriated in the eras campaigns for Federal anti-lynching legislation. Even though Brown could presumably rely on his progressive readers sympathy for the anti-lynching cause, the poems second stanza can only counter these dramatized racial tensions with references to offstage white and black union "brothers" and with a martyrs confidence in a brighter union future.

While the protagonists race may be ambiguous, every sentence of the poem makes clear his gender: Browns sharecropper takes his lethal beating and keeps his union secrets "like a man." In repeatedly emphasizing his heros manhood, Brown exploits a familiar rhetorical strategy of Southern union organizers, "disarming the racism of white workers through an appeal to the masculinity they were said to share with Blacks" (Roediger 165). I. W. W. organizers such as Covington Hall and Ed Lehman generated union solidarity between whites and blacks by "inserting gender as a middle term" between race and class (Roediger 158). As opposed to scabs and non-union workers, union members were men (regardless of race) who defended their rights and families by challenging their capitalist bosses. In the 1930s, the STFU patterned their own organizing efforts after the Wobbly model. As STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell proclaimed, "there are no niggers and no poor white trash in the Union. These two kinds of people are all lined up with the Planters.

We have only Union men in our organization" (qtd. in Dunbar 107). In "Sharecropper," this rhetoric finds expression in the "well-armed riff-raff in the pack," who assault the hero, and in the "brushwood" that must be cleared away for the unions "white oak" and "black-oak" to prosper. Both examples are charged with gendered values. In the first, the heroism of the lone union man confronts the cowardly lynch mob; in the second, two phallic oaks rise from the forest debris. But with both examples class identities inform gendered values. In casting what are presumably non-union whites as feminized "riff-raff" and "brushwood," Brown draws on traditional "redneck" discourses of poor white vilification that elite whites frequently used to denigrate the character and even question the racial purity of white sharecroppers. As with the lynch drama in the first stanza, these characterizations threaten to undermine the poems project of forging interracial union ties by invoking traditional stereotypes of lower class whites.

If the protagonist is ultimately identified as a black sharecropper, then no "manly" union whites appear in the poem, and we are left with only the forecasted and symbolic "white-oak" to represent the agency of sympathetic white sharecroppers. Like its hero, Browns poem will not or cannot identify the place or the identity of its white union brothers. In negotiating the pitfalls of Southern race and class ideologies through the middle term of agrarian manhood, "Sharecropper" foregrounds another dilemma faced by those attempting to unionize farm laborers: how to reconcile industrial unionism with rural republicanism. The agrarian association of manhood and planting that informs the poems closing appeal to interracial collective action borrows from the yeoman ideal that underwrites the agricultural ladder and traditional Jeffersonian republicanism. According to the logic of the agricultural ladder, blacks and sharecroppers were deemed unfit for land ownership, the sine qua non of agrarian manhood and whiteness. Like the STFU, Browns poem tries to rearticulate agrarian manhood to an interracial ideal of union commitment. But the experience of the STFU testifies to the difficulty of divorcing manhood from land ownership.

By the mid-1930s, the independent small farmer had become an anachronism in the Southern black belt, yet the family farm, grounded in the patriarchal appeal of yeoman manhood, continued to figure prominently in the unions goals and self-definition. Despite its name, there were virtually no tenants in the STFU. Centered in the Mississippi Delta of eastern Arkansas, the STFU organized sharecroppers and day laborers working on the regions large cotton plantations. While the postbellum capitalist transformation of the rural South had consolidated land ownership in the hands of the few and reduced the mass of rural Southerners to proletarianized farm laborers, the unions leadership repeatedly proved unwilling to fully confront these historical changes. The STFU elided the class differences among owners, renters, and croppers by defining their membership as "working farmers," thereby representing the "aspirations of its members rather than the reality of their situation" (Foley 186). The STFUs desperate fidelity to the yeoman ideal also doomed the unions short-lived affiliation with UCAPAWA.

The STFU joined this Communist-led, CIO union in 1937 after much debate and soul searching. But by 1939, the STFU had left UCAPAWA. The Socialist STFUwhich saw itself as a "successful combination of a union and a movement for social emancipation" (qtd. in Lichtenstein 50)could never assimilate to what H. L. Mitchell derided as "craft unionism in the cotton fields" (qtd. in Foley 193). To some extent, these tensions represented the incompatibility of the industrial union model with the cultural and economic conditions of Southern farm workers: "STFU members remained rooted in the land, farmed on shares [rather than earning wages], met in rural churches, and never had enough cash to pay the poll tax, let alone union dues" (Lichtenstein 44).

But the STFUs dream of resuscitating the family farmwhether through private ownership or some form of voluntary collectivizationproved the ultimate sticking point: the STFU refused to follow UCAPAWAs directive to divide itself into separate unions for sharecroppers and tenants, farm laborers and farm proprietors. Melodramatic in action and triumphant in tone, Browns "Sharecropper" delivers a stirring call to arms for interracial organizing in the rural South. Yet it is also riddled with the complexities and contradictions of its subject. Despite its selective use of black dialect, "Sharecropper" demonstrates that "the option of a raceless language was an illusory one" in the Jim Crow South, where race structured understandings of class and gender as well as determining economic and political status (Roediger 151). To speak of class or gender was also to speak of race. And vice versa, for the mutual dependency of these terms conditioned life and labor in the cotton fields. Works Cited Brown, Sterling A. "Sharecropper." Get Organized: Stories and Poems about Trade Union People. Ed. Alan Calmer.

New York: International Publishers, 1939. Dunbar, Anthony P. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1981. Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection. 15 Dec. 1998. American Memory. Library of Congress. 11 Sept. 2001. < >. Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Lichtenstein, Alex. "The Southern Tenant Farmers Union: A Movement for Social Emancipation." Introduction. Revolt among the Sharecroppers. 1936. By Howard Kester. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1997. 15-61. Roediger, David R. "Gaining a Hearing for Black-White Unity: Covington Hall and the Complexities of Race, Gender and Class." Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working-Class History.

London: Verso, 1994. Williams, Jim. "International Publishers." Encyclopedia of the American Left. Eds. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992: 372-74. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. New York: Thunders Mouth, 1988. Copyright � 2001 by Matthew Lessig. Adapted from Black Folk/White Bondage: Race, Class and the Literature of Sharecropping, 1925-1942, a dissertation in progress. Mark A. Sanders The sheriff and his "well-armed riff-raff" represent the "tens" that come to reinforce white supremacy. In the tradition of Crispus Attucks McKoy and Wild Bill (both to be seen in Browns last collection), the Union member stands against overwhelming numbers and thus gives his life for larger and more important principles.

In stating "We gonna clean out dis brushwood round here soon, / Plant de white-oak and de black-oak side by side," the Union member reveals a vision of racial solidarity that would ultimately resolve the tension of the era. From Afro-American Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Copyright � 1999 by the University of Georgia Press Jean Wagner Like the democratic ideal, the notion of trade-union solidarity seems unable to bring about, in the foreseeable future, a bond of brotherhood between the races. Either of these goals comes to resemble a trap that has been prepared to ensnare the black. It can lead to death; it does not enable him to live. Witness to this fact is the black hero of "Sharecroppers," shot down by his boss for refusing to reveal the names of the comrades, black and white, whom he had seen at the union meeting. As he gives up his life for his trade-union ideal, he does indeed declare his faith in interracial brotherhood -- but this, it is quite clear, will not be achieved tomorrow. From Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes.

Copyright � 1973 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Sharecropping | New Georgia Encyclopedia Tenant Farmhouse that developed in Georgia and throughout the South following Reconstruction and lasted until the mid-twentieth century. Under this arrangement, laborers with no land of their own worked on farm plots owned by others, and at the end of the season landowners paid workers a share of the crop. Origins Sharecropping evolved following the failure of both the contract labor system and land reform after the Civil War (1861-65). The contract labor system, administered by the Freedmen's Bureau , was Sharecroppers designed to negotiate labor deals between white landowners and former slaves , many of whom resented the system and refused to participate. In addition, despite some talk during and immediately after the war of land reform, in which the federal government would divide Confederate-owned plantations into smaller farms to be distributed to former slaves, most land was returned to its original owners. Instead of enjoying the often quoted "forty acres and a mule" that the government might have provided, freed slaves in Georgia were left with few options as free laborers.

Following the Civil War, plantation owners, without slaves or the money to pay a free labor force, were often unable to farm their land. Sharecropping developed, then, as a system that theoretically benefited both parties. Landowners could have access to the large labor force necessary to grow cotton , but they did not need to pay these laborers money, a major benefit in a post-war Georgia that was cash poor but land rich. The workers, in turn, were free to negotiate a place to work and had the possibility of clearing enough profit at the end of the year to buy farm equipment or even land. Though the system developed from immediate postwar contingencies, it defined the agricultural system in rural Georgia for close to 100 years. By 1880, 32 percent of the state's farms were operated by sharecroppers; this figure would increase in the fifty years following. By 1910 sharecroppers operated 37 percent of the state's 291,027 farms. Tenancy rates in general and sharecropping rates in particular were highest in those portions of the state that grew mostly cotton.

In 1910, for instance, Burke , Dooly , and Houston counties led the state's cotton production, and each had higher than average rates of tenant-operated farms and sharecropper populations. The Labor System Sharecroppers' Shed particulars of sharecropping agreements differed from place to place and over time, but generally those workers who could offer nothing but their ability to perform farm tasks made arrangements that overwhelmingly favored the landlord. In many cases, at the end of a season, a worker might be paid only one-third of the crop that he or she had produced. If a sharecropper and his or her family could provide something other than simply an ability to work—a mule, for example—then they might be paid with a slightly larger portion of the crop at the end of the season. Share-renters were laborers who could promise the landowner a fixed portion of the crop as payment for "renting" the land for a season. In this case the laborer might promise the landlord ten bushels of cottonseed in the fall as a fixed rent, and in turn the cropper would rely less on the landowner for support during the season.

Land was not, however, the only thing sharecroppers needed from the owners. The owners of the state's largest plantations would also sell fertilizer, seed, clothing, shoes, and some food from the plantation store. Croppers working smaller operations often bought these necessities from local furnishing merchants. The laborers rarely had cash, however, so in both cases they were extended credit to make purchases. In the fall, after harvesting the crop, landowners gave the workers their shares of the crop, oftentimes forcing the croppers to sell it straight to either the local furnishing agent or merchant, or even to the landowners themselves. With whatever cash the laborers made in this sale, they attempted to pay back the debt accrued during the season from the supplier. This Sharecroppers exchange was notorious for permitting landowners, creditors, and cotton buyers to defraud farmers. A sharecropper, often illiterate, rarely had the opportunity to check the books and add up his or her own debt, to calculate the interest, or even to shop his or her cotton to different buyers. In many cases the sharecropper was told that the amount he made selling his crop was not sufficient to settle the debts accrued during the year.

In this case the workers were bound to the landlord for another season. Though much has been made of the system of peonage that kept sharecroppers in perpetual debt, tying workers to the same plantation year after year, there is significant evidence that Georgia croppers moved rather fluidly from place to place and from one form of labor to another. Certainly the reality of life as a sharecropper was a factor in the out-migration of rural Georgians in the 1910s and after. The sociologist Arthur F. Raper found in his study of Macon and Greene counties that of those Georgians fleeing the rural part of the state in the 1920s, the greatest numbers came from the ranks of sharecroppers. Despite the common perception that sharecropping was a black institution, sharecroppers were drawn from the ranks of all poor Georgians. In 1910, of the state's 27 million farm acres, tenants operated 11 million acres; black Georgians farmed slightly more than half of this tenant-tilled acreage. African Americans were, however, much more likely to farm land owned by someone else rather than to work their own land.

Fewer than 16,000 farms were operated by black owners in 1910, while during the same year African Americans managed 106,738 farms as tenants. Sharecropper Life Sharecroppers' House most sharecroppers, making money and paying off debts were not the only factors that mattered when it came to deciding whether or not to stay on a certain farm from one year to the next. In many cases a major factor was the extent to which the landowner attempted to control workers' non-farm life. Though the owners instructed the croppers on how much acreage was to be planted in each crop, when the crops were to be planted and harvested, how much fertilizer was to be applied, and how the farm was to be run in general, the croppers had a degree of social independence. The plight of Georgia sharecroppers, in particular, received national attention with the publication of Erskine Caldwell 's best-selling novel Tobacco Road in 1932.

Caldwell based his fictional family of poor white tenants, the hapless and increasingly desperate Lesters, on actual farm families he had observed in and around his boyhood home of Wrens, just southwest of Augusta , in Jefferson County . Along with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Caldwell provided an equally effective nonfiction commentary on the impact of the Great Depression on Georgia's poorest farmers in You Have Seen Their Faces, published in 1937. Other nonfictional Georgia-based studies of sharecropping life and culture include several books by the sociologist Arthur F. Raper, who focused his attention on Greene and Macon counties in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Many years later, author Harry Crews 's memoir entitled A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978) provided vivid descriptions of his early life as part of a sharecropping family in depression-era Bacon County . End of Sharecropping Sharecropping in Georgia ended in the mid-twentieth century, in part because workers left the fields for southern and northern cities.

Black Georgians left the state for a variety of reasons, and landowners sought new technologies to make cotton growing possible (and less expensive) with fewer people in the fields. Poor whites , too, moved away from agricultural labor for industrial jobs in the state's growing cities. Tractors, mechanical cotton pickers, and other technological advances also allowed landowners to increase their yields with fewer workers. In 1997 the U.S. census reported just 2,607 tenant farmers in Georgia, with no special classification for sharecropping. Prior to these developments, however, from the 1870s through the 1940s, sharecropping was a labor system that kept poor black and white Georgians working in agriculture. For black Georgians in particular, this labor system was a major obstacle to being fully able to realize and enjoy the social and political rights granted to them at the end of the Civil War.

You Might Also Like Sharecropping and tenant farming - North Carolina Digital History North Carolina Digital History Changes in agriculture Important Message about LEARN NC LEARN NC is evaluating its role in the current online education environment as it relates directly to the mission of UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education (UNC-CH SOE). We plan to look at our ability to facilitate the transmission of the best research coming out of UNC-CH SOE and other campus partners to support classroom teachers across North Carolina. We will begin by evaluating our existing faculty and student involvement with various NC public schools to determine what might be useful to share with you. Donât worry! The lesson plans, articles, and textbooks you use and love arenât going away. They are simply being moved into the new LEARN NC Digital Archive. While we are moving away from a focus on publishing, we know itâs important that educators have access to these kinds of resources. These resources will be preserved on our website for the foreseeable future. That said, weâre directing our resources into our newest efforts, so we wonât be adding to the archive or updating its contents.

This means that as the North Carolina Standard Course of Study changes in the future, we wonât be re-aligning resources. Our full-text and tag searches should make it possible for you to find exactly what you need, regardless of standards alignment. 1.3 Sharecropping and tenant farming Provided by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources / Office of Archives and History . Sharecropping was common throughout the South well into the twentieth century, and required the work of entire families. In this famous photograph, a six year-old girl picks cotton in Oklahoma. (Photograph by Lewis W. Hine. More about the photograph ) After the Civil War, thousands of former slaves and white farmers forced off their land by the bad economy lacked the money to purchase the farmland, seeds, livestock, and equipment they needed to begin farming. Former planters were so deeply in debt that they could not hire workers. They needed workers who would not have to be paid until they harvested a crop — usually one of the two labor-intensive cash crops that still promised to make money: cotton or tobacco. Many of these landowners divided their lands into smaller plots and turned to a tenant system.

During the Gilded Age many African Americans and whites lacked the money to buy farmland and farm supplies. They became tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Tenant farmers usually paid the landowner rent for farmland and a house. They owned the crops they planted and made their own decisions about them. After harvesting the crop, the tenant sold it and received income from it. From that income, he paid the landowner the amount of rent owed. Sharecroppers seldom owned anything. Instead, they borrowed practically everything — not only the land and a house but also supplies, draft animals , tools, equipment, and seeds. The sharecropper contributed his, and his familyâs, labor. Sharecroppers had no control over which crops were planted or how they were sold. After harvesting the crop, the landowner sold it and applied its income toward settling the sharecropperâs account. Most tenant farmers and sharecroppers bought everything they needed on credit from local merchants , hoping to make enough money at harvest time to pay their debts. Learn more about the crop-lien system . Over the years, low crop yields and unstable crop prices forced more farmers into tenancy. The crop-lien system kept many in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.

Between 1880 and 1900, the number of tenants increased from 53,000 to 93,000. By 1890, one in three white farmers and three of four black farmers were either tenants or sharecroppers. This map shows the percent of each county's farms that were sharecropped in 1890. (Map courtesy of LEARN NC . More about the map ) Learn more For teachers Lesson plan: From slavery to sharecropping After the Civil War, a central element of the Southern economy -- slavery -- was abolished. As those newly free sought rightful payment for farming and former masters strove to maintain their control and profits, a system of sharecropping and tenant farming developed. In this lesson from the North Carolina Civic Education Consortium, students will learn about the history of sharecropping and tenant farming through a Power Point presentation and discussion, photo analysis, and reading primary source documents. Students will apply their knowledge creatively by writing and performing a role play between a sharecropper and landowner. Related topics Search LEARN NC for more resources on North Carolina , crop-lien system , debt , farming , history , and sharecropping .

A “digital textbook” LEARN NC’s digital textbook for North Carolina History uses primary sources and multimedia to tell many stories about the past, not just one. Part seven explores the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the state in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Definitions Definition of Sharecropping By Robert McNamara Updated March 22, 2016. Sharecropping was a system of agriculture instituted in the American South in the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War . It essentially replaced the plantation system which had existed, with slave labor, in the years before the war. In sharecropping, a poor farmer who did not own land would work a plot belonging to a landowner. The farmer would receive a share of the harvest as payment. Generally speaking, sharecropping doomed freed slaves to a life of poverty. Beginning of the Sharecropping System Following the elimination of slavery , the plantation system in the South could no longer exist. Landowners, such as cotton planters who had owned vast plantations, had to face a new economic reality. They may have owned vast amounts of land, but they did not have the labor to work it, and they did not have the money to hire farm workers.

The millions of freed slaves also had to face a new way of life. Though freed from bondage, they had to cope with numerous problems in the post-slavery economy. continue reading below our video 10 Facts About the Titanic That You Don't Know Many freed slaves were illiterate, and all they knew was farm work. And they were unfamiliar with the concept of working for wages. Indeed, with freedom, many former slaves aspired to become independent farmers owning land. And such aspirations were fueled by rumors that the U.S. government would help them get a start as farmers with a promise of "forty acres and a mule." In reality, former slaves were seldom able to establish themselves as independent farmers. And as plantation owners broke up their estates into smaller farms, many former slaves became sharecroppers on the land of their former masters. How Sharecropping Worked In a typical situation, a landowner would supply a farmer and his family with a house, which may have been a shack previously used as a slave cabin. The landowner would also supply seeds, farming tools, and other necessary materials. The cost of such items would later be deducted from anything the farmer earned.

Much of the farming done as sharecropping was essentially the same type of labor-intensive cotton farming which had been done under slavery. At harvest time, the crop was taken by the landowner to market and sold. From the money received, the landowner would first deduct the cost of seeds and any other supplies. The proceeds of what was left would be split between the landowner and the farmer. In a typical scenario the farmer would receive half, though sometimes the share given to the farmer would be less. In such a situation, the farmer, or sharecropper, was essentially powerless. And if the harvest was bad, the sharecropper could actually wind up in debt to the landowner. Such debts were virtually impossible to overcome, so sharecropping often created situations where farmers were locked into a life of poverty. Some sharecroppers, if they had successful harvests and managed to accumulate enough cash, could become tenant farmers, which was considered a higher status. A tenant farmer rented land from a landowner, and had more control over how the management of his farming. However, tenant farmers also tended to be mired in poverty.

Economic Effects of Sharecropping While the sharecropping system arose from the devastation following the Civil War , and was a response to an urgent situation, it became a permanent situation in the South. And over the span of decades it was not beneficial for southern agriculture. One negative effect of sharecropping was that it tended to create a one-crop economy. Landowners tended to want sharecroppers to plant and harvest cotton, as that was the crop with the most value, and the lack of crop rotation tended to exhaust the soil. There were also severe economic problems as the price of cotton fluctuated. Very good profits could be made in cotton if the conditions and weather were favorable. But it tended to be speculative. By the end of the 19th century, the price of cotton had dropped considerably. In 1866 cotton prices were in the range of 43 cents a pound, and by the 1880s and 1890s it never went above 10 cents a pound. At the same time that the price of cotton was dropping, farms in the South were being carved up into smaller and smaller plots. All these conditions contributed to an widespread poverty.

And for most freed slaves, the system of sharecropping and the resulting poverty meant their dream of operating their own farm could never be achieved.

Question: The American term 'sharecropper' refers to a?
Answer: Tenant farmer