Sharecropping is a labor system that came about in the immediate aftermath of slavery. In the absence of slave labor, white landowners would lease part of their land to Black farmers in exchange for a share of the crop yield. However, unpredictable harvests, high interest rates, and other economic factors led to many sharecroppers remaining economically insecure or in debt and reliant on white landlords, who, in turn, exploited their tenants and made it effectively impossible for them to prosper.
Sharecropping Quotes in Coming of Age in Mississippi
The Coming of Age in Mississippi quotes below are all either spoken by Sharecropping or refer to Sharecropping. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
I’m still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter’s plantation. Lots of Negroes lived on his place. Like Mama and Daddy they were all farmers. We all lived in rotten two-room shacks. But ours stood out from the others because it was up on the hill with Mr. Carter’s big white house, overlooking the farms and the other shacks below.
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Chapter 23
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The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the federal government was directly or indirectly responsible for most of the segregation, discrimination, and poverty in the South.
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Sharecropping Term Timeline in Coming of Age in Mississippi
The timeline below shows where the term Sharecropping appears in Coming of Age in Mississippi. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...up on Mr. Carter’s plantation. She lives with her parents (Mama and Daddy), who are sharecroppers on the plantation, and her baby sister, Adline. She describes life on the plantation for...
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Chapter 23
...government’s uneven system of distributing crops caused the independent Black farmers to be “practically like sharecroppers.” The CORE movement in Canton is made up of mostly teenagers.
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