** sharecropping racial connotations








Sharecropping: Racial Connotations


Figure 1.--This is one of Lewis Hine's remarkable photographs. All these children were primary school age and picking (often called chopping) on H.M. Lane's farm near Bells,Texas. his is east Texas. West Texas is generally too arid for cotton. According to Hine, "All these children five years, six years, seven years, nine years and two a little older, were picking cotton on H.M. Lane's farm. Only one adult, an aunt was picking. Father was plowing. Edith five years, picks all day. "Hughie" six years old, girl, picks all day. Alton, seven years old, picks fifty pounds a day. Ruth, nine years old, picks seventy-five pounds a day. Rob and Lee are about ten or eleven years old. The very young children like to pick, but before long they detest it. Sun is hot, hours long, bags heavy. Location: Bells, Texas." When the cotton pickers got to the field, each was given a sack with a strap that went over the shoulder. That left both hands free to pick. No one wore gloves. The boll that holds the cotton is quite sharp, and by the end of the day, fingers were sore, cut and bleeding. According to the 1900 US Census about 1 in every 6 Children between the ages of five and ten were engaged in 'gainful occupations' in the United States."

Share cropping developed after the Civil War (1861-65) The first share croppers were the former black slaves freed by the Federal arny. The planters under the share cropping system contnued to a large degree to dominate, but no longer control the lives of the blacks working their land. Gradually the system was extended to poor white farmers. While the system at first developed to obtain black labor, eventually poor whites also entered the sharecropping system in large numbers. One assessment suggests that by the 20th century, approximately two-thirds of all sharecroppers/tenant farmers were white, and one third were black. [Oakley, p. 184.] The precise numbers varied from state to state. In Tennessee, whites were two thirds or more of the sharecroppers. [McKenzie] The ratio was different in the Deep South. In Mississippi, by 1900, about a third of white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85 percent of black farmers did not own the land they farmed. [Bolton] In Georgia, blacks in 1910 owned fewer than 16,000 farms, but worked 107,000 farms. [Geisen] In all southern states most black farmers were share croppersor tennanbt farmers. he relative proportion, however, was different. Relatively few blacks actually owned the land tthat they worked. [Kirby] Many more white farmers owned their land.

Sources

Bolton, Charles. "Farmers without land: The plight of white tenant farmers and sharecroppers", Mississippi History Now, (March 2004).

Davis, Ronald L. F. "The U. S. Army and the origins of sharecropping in the Natchez District: A case study," The Journal of Negro History Vol. 62, No.1 (January, 1977), pp. 60–80.

Geisen, James C. "Sharecropping," New Georgia Encyclopedia (January 26, 2007).

Kirby, Jack Temple. "Black anbd white in the rfural south, 1915-1954," Agricultural History Vol. 58, No. 3 (July 1984), pp. 411-22. This was a Symposium on the History of Rural Life in America.

McKenzie, Robert Tracy. "Sharecropping", Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.

Oakley, Giles. The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues (Da Capo Press, 1997).





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Created: 4:07 PM 7/31/2021
Last updated: 4:07 PM 7/31/2021