Summary: Sharecropping System

I can understand both of the arguments presented in these two passages. On one side, we have regular workers trying to establish a stable and reliable source of income, one that they can use to provide for themselves. On the other side we have a business that has to keep the customers, employees, and it's own needs in mind. After considering the information supporting each of these sides, I have come to a position that falls somewhere in the middle.

     After the devastation left from the Civil War, many field owners looked for new ways to replace their former slaves with field hands for farming and production use. From this need for new field hands came sharecroppers, a “response to the destitution and disorganized” agricultural results of the Civil War (Wilson 29). Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion of the crops that they bring in for their landowners. These farmhands provided their labor, while the landowners provided living accommodations for the worker and his family, along with tools, seeds, fertilizers, and a portion of the crops that they had harvested that season. A sharecropper had “no entitlement

In Faulkner’s These types of arrangements were quite common at this time between sharecroppers and their landlords. The sharecroppers had little to no money, so the landlords would charge them for items, or take an extra percentage of their crops.

The sharecroppers paid "rent" with a share of the crops that they raised, with roughly one-half of all they produced belonged to the white owner (Ransom and Sutch, 1977). The landowner also advanced money to the farmer to purchase seed and other necessary farming equipment. The problem was the sharecroppers rarely, if ever, made enough money from the sale of their crops to pay back their debt. This often led to what some called "debt peonage," and it effectively bound sharecroppers to the land, and the landowner (Bowles, 2011). This was a veiled form of slavery, much like convict leasing was.

During reconstruction, blacks were no longer forced to work as slaves however they still needed to work to support themselves and their families. Not many blacks had skills outside of farming so most worked the lands of the wealthy white landowners but not as slaves. They had the right to do whatever they wanted and the landowners could do nothing about it. Wealthy landowners still needed work hands and blacks needed an income so former slaveholders established the sharecropping system. Land owned by a white person would be farmed by black families and they shared the crop yield. This often resulted in the white person taking more than their share and the black families struggled to support themselves. Sharecropping did little to help economic advancement for blacks and was a way the white man could prevent blacks from making enough money

Arguing that the majority of farmers during the Great Depression benefitted from the government policies produced through President Roosevelt’s New Deal is an inaccurate claim. While history textbooks highlight the improvement of finances for people in rural areas in the United States of America, the personal experiences of family farmers

After the slaves were freed in 1863, the South had to make changes to supply labor for the farming. Many shady practices by the white man occurred because of this. Sharecropping and crop liens were developed to keep the black man somewhat under their control. Since freed slaves had no money and no place to live, land holders would allow a tenant to live on their property and worked the land in exchange for a share of the crop produced, also known as sharecropping. The crop lien system was a developed to allow farmers to receive goods such as food, supplies, and seeds to be paid for after the crop was produced. This kept the black man and poor white farmers in a constant form of debt.

Between the late 1800s and mid-1900s, to help procure land, supplies, and workers, farmers turned to sharecropping. In mostly all instances of sharecropping the croppers would get a percentage of the crops they worked while the rest would go to the landowner. In most situations

The primary motivation behind the sharecropping framework is to keep the inhabitants in the red to their territory proprietors, constraining them to reimburse the obligation as work, which is otherwise called the Peonage framework. Kid Willie's family has been under the control of the sharecropping framework with their property proprietor being the Sutter's gang. Kid Willie needs to break out of the convention of sharecropping like his dad, however the main way he could do this is by obtaining the area that Sutter offered to Boy Willie. Keeping in mind the end goal to buy the offered area, Boy Willie must offer the piano that has a considerable measure of nostalgic quality to Berniece. Kid Willie once said, "If Berniece wouldn't like to offer that piano... I'm gonna sliced it down the middle and go on and offer my half. (p. 28)" This demonstrates that Boy Willie is willing to do whatever it takes to get enough cash for the area on the grounds that it's an ideal chance to stop being a tenant

After the Civil War, African Americans were free but with no place to live in or to work at, they settled with their former ‘masters’. African Americans were technically free, but no one wanted to hire a colored man, so they were put on crop lien work contracts. These contracts allowed African Americans to work and gain a ‘share’ of the harvest. Sounds like a deal right? Wrong. At the end of the harvest a black man would receive his share but the

The development of sharecropping was associated with the endless debt cycles that afflicted the entire South well into the twentieth century. The freedmen endured an economic status likened to peonage, (Bowles, 2011) in addition to having their hopes for political and social equality dashed. The entire South suffered, it was the freedmen who paid the highest price. Ignorant and impoverished, they were easy targets for exploitation by landlords (Bowles, 2011) and merchants alike; moreover, their options were limited by the overt racism in the South, legal restrictions and partiality. Sharecropping resulted from the intense explicit or implicit desire of white Southerners to keep blacks subservient to them. African Americans possessed few skills, and those they did possess related almost exclusively to agricultural production; they owned no property but the clothes on their backs; (Bowles, 2011) Many dreamed of "forty acres and a mule" with which to begin life anew as an integrated part of American society and the proprietor of one's own land. Inside of a year, however, a different reality became obvious to most. By 1868, land confiscation and redistribution was not in the realm of American political possibility. Desperation, familiarity with people and surroundings at the old places coupled with reunion of many lost loved ones, as well as the urgings of

This Sharecropping is in southern economy is more like disarray because of knowing this slavery is it a devastation of the civil wars. As knowing between of white landowners they are attempting into Larose on this labor of force this freedmen black seeking on their own independences of autonomy. That why there would so many slaves has this feed to the governments to giving to them of amount of their land. If there such a thing if they able to work and or so see if they able keeping working during the slavery ears. This a number of freed men are 40 see if they able abandoned land over the army because all they want know if they would get this land for this slavery on labor of resulted of sharecropping. This black family is rent a small plots

James Agee and Walker Evans Fortune Magazine, in July and August of 1936, sent James Agee and Walker Evans to research a story on sharecropping. In the preface of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee describes it as “a curious piece of work.” They were to produce “an article on cotton tenantry in the United States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers,” (IX). James Agee and Walker Evans set out to write and photograph an article for a magazine, and ended up experimenting with the form of the novel itself.

While watching this documentary I saw the manipulation by the wealthy, I say this because I do not believe introducing competition to the poor is helpful to the needy. Another example that proves my point is when one of the farmer’s tried to sell cherry tomatoes and honeydew melons he is told by his American consumer that his product does not have the quality and it does not meet their standards. In response to this he states in an interview “We use machete to farm but the world use machines, can machete compete with machine”.

Chapter 5 (pgs 42-53):Tenant Farmer: a person who farms land rented from another, the rent usually taking the form of part of the crops grown or livestock reared (Farlex Free Dictionary). The owners of the land came onto the land, and the tenants watch the expensives cars drive over there