An often exploitative system of semi-indentured labor, in which landless workers pay landowners for the right to farm their land. In the United States, a sharecropping system replaced slavery in the Southern United States after the Civil War, and left many freed slaves working the same backbreaking agricultural jobs on plantations, often for their former owners. Rather than being the legal property of plantation owners, under the sharecropping system African Americans were simply charged more than their total income by landowners, and forced into progressively deeper cycles of unpayable debt as a result.
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Sharecropping Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Sharecropping appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
...a Louisiana town deemed “the poorest place in America,” Stevenson’s family did not have to sharecrop, since his father owned some land, but he still grew up farming. In fact, the...
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Chapter 3: Racial Zoning
...goods and public services, denied basic rights to African American people, and replaced slavery with sharecropping. Before the 1876 election, white supremacists organized massacres and attempted to overthrow state and local...
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Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
...truly free work was not available to most African American people. Many were forced into sharecropping, which trapped them in cycles of unrepayable debt, and at least 100,000 people were sold...
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