A farm labor system that spread across the South after emancipation, in which landless families worked another’s land for a share of the crop.
Sharecropping took shape across the South in the years after the Civil War. Planters had land but little cash and no enslaved workforce. Freedpeople wanted independence and refused to return to gang labor and the old slave quarters, but the land redistribution many had hoped for never came (see forty acres and a mule). The result was a share-based arrangement: a family farmed a plot of someone else’s land and, at harvest, received a portion of the crop.
The share depended on what the worker brought. A cropper who provided only labor typically received about one-third of the crop; one who supplied a mule, tools, and seed could claim as much as half. Renters who supplied their own animals and materials had more independence. In North Carolina the law defined sharecropping as wage labor, leaving croppers under the landowner’s close supervision.
The trap was credit. Croppers bought food, seed, and supplies on credit from the landlord’s store or a furnishing merchant, who took a lien on the unharvested crop. Markups and interest could exceed 50 percent a year, landlords often controlled where the crop was sold, and many croppers could not read the accounts kept against them. Year after year families broke even or ended deeper in debt, while cotton fell from 18 cents a pound in 1868 to 5 cents in 1894. By 1910 Black Georgians operated more than 106,000 tenant farms but owned fewer than 16,000.
Sharecropping declined in the mid-twentieth century as New Deal farm programs, the Great Migration, wartime industrial jobs, tractors, and mechanical cotton pickers made it obsolete. Its imprint on Black life was deep. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta when she tried to register to vote. Jackie Robinson was born to Georgia sharecroppers, and Bessie Coleman grew up in a sharecropping family in Texas.
See also: Forty Acres and a Mule, Convict Leasing, Black Codes, Great Migration, Jim Crow
Sources
- New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Sharecropping.” Link
- Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Sharecropping and Tenant Farming in Alabama.” Link
- NCpedia, “Sharecropping.” Link
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