The+Sharecropper's+Story

=The Sharecropper's Story =

It was Depression-era America, and “cotton was king” in southeast Missouri. Like many regions in the South, plantation owners controlled thousands of acres, much of it planted in cotton. Sharecroppers were the labor of choice. The majority African Americans and descendants of slaves, sharecroppers worked the land for sub-standard housing and a minimal share of the profit. “Just a step better than slavery,” was how Johnny McWilliams described it. Another woman, a daughter of a sharecropper, recalls how she watched her father cry after coming home with one of the landowner’s old suits as payment for an entire year’s work. Living conditions for sharecroppers in the Bootheel and across the South were often bleak and food and money were scarce.

Conditions worsened after the U.S. government passed the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1932. This law provided government payments to landowners who reduced their cotton acreage, but also required them to share 25 percent of these payments with their sharecroppers. However, instead of sharing the money, many landowners decided to keep it all for themselves, evicting their sharecroppers and hiring day laborers in their place. Over 990,000 sharecroppers nationwide were left penniless and homeless.

Poorly organized and with limited power due to the Jim Crow laws of the day, African American and poor white sharecroppers had little voice to influence the law or fight for their rights to the payments.

"I don't know of any other way to put it. It is a manner of slavery that existed. That's all it was. You were enslaved to the landowner that had the money. And there was nowhere else to go. Limited by education, or noneducation. It was just a revolving door for the people back then. And a lot of blacks were in the same situation right along with the whites."

//- Irvin Fields, son of a sharecropper// Read more of Fields' story and others in //[|The Most Famous Story We Never Told.]//

[|A Sharecropper's Life]

[|A Georgia Sharecropper's Story of Forced Labor]

[|"The Planter and the Sharecropper" by John Handcox]

[|Photo Gallery] : This site includes Library of Congress photographs of sharecroppers and their families from the early 20th century. They depict typical housing and living conditions for sharecroppers.