“WHEN WE WORKED ON SHARES, WE COULDN’T MAKE NOTHING”: HENRY BLACK TALKS ABOUT SHARECROPPING AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
An interview with an African-American farmer born in 1863, conducted for a New Deal oral history project about ex-slaves. Henry Blake shares his experiences helping his parents gin cotton and struggle to make a living under the early system of sharecropping.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6377/
“THE SERFS OF RUSSIA…WERE GIVEN THREE ACRES OF LAND”
In this speech, given many years after Reconstructions ended, Frederick Douglass laments the development of sharecropping in the South, and links it to the failure of land confiscation in Reconstruction.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/recon/douglass.htm
"DRUG HIM THROUGH THE STREET": HUGHSEY CHILDES DESCRIBES TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY SHARECROPPING
Here Hughsey Childes, interviewed by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, described what seems like a matter of fact exchange in which a white landowner cheated a black sharecropper. But when the sharecropper got "a little wise" and withheld some of the crop from the landlord, the punishment was swift and final.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/81/
"STILL LIVIN' UNDER THE BONDS OF SLAVERY": MINNIE WHITNEY DESCRIBES SHARECROPPING AT THE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY
In this interview done by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, Minnie Whitney, born in 1902, described the determined efforts of more progressive farmers like her father, who along with her mother struggled to maintain some self-sufficiency in the face of white determination to enforce African-American dependence on the sharecropping system.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/82/
NOT FREE YET
A freed slave describes the violence he lived through after Emancipation.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/sharecrop/ps_adams.html
A SHARECROPPING CONTRACT
Many ex-slaves were compelled to sign unfair labor contracts like this one.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/sharecrop/ps_dawson.html
GOOD AND KIND TREATMENT IS REQUIRED
A model contract reveals some of the injustices typical of sharecropping arrangements.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/sharecrop/ps_delany2.html
SHARECROPPING: PBS RECONSTRUCTION VIDEO CLIP
Freedmen seek rights as workers, and landowners seek control over their labor. (8:33 length)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/players/vb_sharecrop_qry.html