Sharecropping in
Georgia ended
in the mid-twentieth century, in part because workers left the fields for southern and northern cities. Black Georgians left the state for a variety of reasons, not least the greater degree of freedom afforded by northern states.
Traditional sharecropping declined
after mechanization of farm work became economical
beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As a result, many sharecroppers were forced off the farms, and migrated to cities to work in factories, or became migrant workers in the Western United States during World War II.
Some Black people managed to acquire enough money to move from sharecropping to renting or owning land by the end of the 1860s, but many more went
into debt
or were forced by poverty or the threat of violence to sign unfair and exploitative sharecropping or labor contracts that left them little hope of improving their …
How did the sharecropping system work, and why did it create problems for both sharecroppers and small landowners? …
The landowner would provide the farming supplies on credit
, and, because the value of crops was lower after the war, sharecroppers could rarely produce enough of a harvest to pay what they owed.
The Great Depression had devastating effects on sharecropping, as did the
South’s continued overproduction of and overemphasis on cotton and the ravages of the destructive boll weevil
. Cotton prices fell dramatically after the stock market crash of 1929, and the ensuing downturn bankrupted farmers.
Approximately two-thirds
of all sharecroppers were white, and one third were black.
What was most likely to happen if a sharecropper did not like the contract the landowner offered?
The landowner would force the sharecropper to sign. The landowner would ask a lawyer to review it.
Sharecropping is an arrangement in which property owners allow tenants to farm a piece of land in exchange for a share of the crop. … It was a way landowners could still command labor, often by African Americans, to keep their farms profitable. It had faded in most places by the 1940s. But
not everywhere
.
Sharecropping was bad
because it increased the amount of debt that poor people owed the plantation owners. Sharecropping was similar to slavery because after a while, the sharecroppers owed so much money to the plantation owners they had to give them all of the money they made from cotton.
Sharecropping developed, then, as a system that theoretically
benefited both parties
. Landowners could have access to the large labor force necessary to grow cotton, but they did not need to pay these laborers money, a major benefit in a post-war Georgia that was cash poor but land rich.
The
high interest rates landlords and sharecroppers charged for goods bought on credit
(sometimes as high as 70 percent a year) transformed sharecropping into a system of economic dependency and poverty. The freedmen found that “freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”
Was reconstruction a success or failure?
Explain. Reconstruction was
a success in
that it restored the United States as a unified nation: by 1877, all of the former Confederate states had drafted new constitutions, acknowledged the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and pledged their loyalty to the U.S. government.
How did slavery change after the Civil War?
The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freed African Americans in rebel states, and after the Civil War,
the Thirteenth Amendment emancipated all U.S. slaves wherever they were
. … Former slaves of every age took advantage of the opportunity to become literate.
What effect did the system of sharecropping have on the South after the Civil War?
It kept formerly enslaved persons economically dependent. It brought investment capital to the South. It encouraged Northerners to migrate south.
They did not have slaves or money to pay a free labor force, so sharecropping developed
as a system that could benefit plantation owners and former slaves
. Landowners would have access to a large labor force, and the newly freed slaves were looking for work.
Sharecropping was
widespread in the South during Reconstruction
, after the Civil War. It was a way landowners could still command labor, often by African Americans, to keep their farms profitable. It had faded in most places by the 1940s. But not everywhere.
