Many Former Slaves Were Forced into Sharecropping
After the Civil War, many African Americans were finally freed from slavery. However, this wasn’t the end of exploiting their labor. Unfortunately, many of these former slaves were forced into “sharecropping“. This was a type of farming where a family would rent a plot of land from a landowner, and farm the land. Part of their crop was given to the landowner every year as payment. Two-thirds of these sharecroppers were actually white, while a third were black. However, many of these black former slaves were coerced by violence into a sharecropping contract with their former owners. They also had to take out loans in order to buy their own farming equipment. It put them in so much debt that it kept rolling over year after year, and they were never able to work their way out of poverty.