Sharecropping Essay

Sharecropping is when a landowner allows somebody to use their land in return for a share of the crops grown on the land. It was most common in the South after the Civil War. The freed slaves chose to be share croppers because farming was the only thing that they knew how to do. Instead of getting wages for working an owner’s land, most freed slaves preferred to rent land for a fixed payment, because they were afraid that they would still have to be told what to do. In the first years after the Civil War, most black people in rural areas of the South were left without land and forced to work as laborers on white-owned farms and plantations so they could earn a living. In an attempt to control the labor force and maintain white authority in the South, laws were soon passed that denied blacks many rights, making them sign yearly labor contracts.

Black sharecroppers were often forced to give the majority of their crops to the landowner, and sometimes they went into debt or were forced into poverty. High interest rates and unpredictable harvests kept many sharecropping families greatly indebted. They would remain tied to the land and it was unlikely that they would leave for other opportunities. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or sometimes illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord. The use of sharecropping declined after 1940, due to a combination of factors. The most important were the increasing mechanization of farms, which rendered the labor of sharecroppers more unnecessary, and the growing demand for labor outside the South, which caused some sharecroppers to migrate to northern and western