Was Sharecropping Good for Blacks

Sharecropping The author of this response has been asked to answer a few questions about sharecropping. The first question is how the practice and pattern of sharecropping emerged as a compromise between the landowners and the wishes of the people that had been freed. Another question is whether blacks scarified the reality of economic advancement when they entered into sharecropping arrangements with the aforementioned landowners. In other words, it should be answered to whether and to what degree the arrangement presented the illusion of autonomy for blacks.

Sharecropping was a practice that emerged during the Civil War. Rather than pay a monetary fee to the owner of the land, the owner of the land would simply get a share of the crop that the parcel of land yielded. Quite often, the crop that was often in question was cotton, although there were others. The sharecropping system was, at least to many, a thinly veiled return of racism.

The landowners needed the work after slavery was abolished but the ex-slaves did not have the means to buy and harvest their own land. The sharecropping arrangement was, as noted above, quite non-voluntary on the part of the blacks as they had few other options to get by due to lack of education and still-rampant racism. As such, any indications or perceptions of autonomy were largely dismissed quickly as it was clear that the blacks in question were still second-class citizens in many regards.

However, there was a progression over time. While ex-slaves were initially the biggest sliver of sharecroppers, poor white people were eventually brought into the system. When it came to blacks, true autonomy and freedom could only come when they themselves owned and controlled the land rather than leasing their parcel at a huge premium to the white landowner.

The sharecropping arrangement was indeed a compromise in that white landowners had few (if any) other options when it came to paying for labor for their fields in a post-slavery world and blacks had no starting capital or other resources to venture out on their own. Conclusion In the end, there was an eventual progression for blacks and they have since been able to realize more of the freedoms and opportunities that whites have enjoyed.