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t. e. Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is not to be conflated with tenant farming, providing the tenant a higher economic and social status. Sharecropping has a long history and there is a wide range of ...
t. e. Rice plantation. The role of African Americans in the agricultural history of the United States includes roles as the main work force when they were enslaved on cotton and tobacco plantations in the Antebellum South. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863-1865 most stayed in farming as very poor sharecroppers, who rarely owned land.
By the 1880s, white farmers also became sharecroppers. The system was distinct from that of the tenant farmer, who rented the land, provided his own tools and mule and kept the crop (or paid some to the landowner through "crop rent"). Landowners provided more supervision to sharecroppers, and less or none to tenant farmers.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), later known as the National Farm Labor Union, the National Agricultural Workers Union, and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union, was founded as a civil farmer's union to organize tenant farmers in the Southern United States. [1][2][3] Many such tenant farmer sharecroppers were Black descendants of ...
As sharecroppers were often illiterate, they had to depend on the books and accounting by the landowner and his staff. Other tactics included debiting expenses against the sharecropper's profits after the crop was harvested and "miscalculating" the net profit from the harvest, thereby keeping the sharecropper in perpetual debt to the landowner.
Tenant farmer on his front porch, south of Muskogee, Oklahoma (1939). A tenant farmer is a person (farmer or farmworker) who resides on land owned by a landlord.Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of ...
Barn on tenant's farm in Walker County, Alabama, 1937. Tenant farming characterized the cotton and tobacco production in the post-Civil War South. As the agricultural economy plummeted in the early 1930s, all farmers were badly hurt but the tenant farmers and sharecroppers experienced the worst of it. [14]
The great majority of Black people in this period were farmers. Among them were four main groups, three of which worked for white landowners: tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers. [27] [28] [29] The fourth group were the Black people who owned their own farms, and were to some degree independent of white economic control. [30]