Quotes About Sharecropping

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

My parents were sharecrop farm kids with no education - seventh, eighth grade.

My grandmother was a sharecropper. That wasn't even that long ago! My grandma was a sharecropper.

My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.

I learned conservatism through my grandfather; I didn't know that was the name. I didn't know these were conservative principles. Starting his life on a sharecropping farm. Working tremendously hard. Five years old, picking cotton and laying tobacco out to dry on a farm, and today he now owns that farm.

In all post-emancipation societies the balance between the possibility of land ownership and self-sufficiency for ex-slaves and their dependence on wager labor determined the tightness of this labor control. In the US South planters effectively transformed ex-slaves into an agricultural proletariat with a gamut of labor relations ranging from tenancy to sharecropping to debt-peonage. The necessary political corollary of this labor system was the preservation of white supremacy.

It was almost like being on an urban plantation, a kind of modern-day sharecropping. You worked hard, brought in your crop, and you were always in debt to the landholder.

What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters' need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied.