Sharecropping is not slavery
but it did become,
for an enormous population of people,
forced labor.
And I think that
splitting hairs
about what's slavery,
what's involuntary servitude,
what's forced labor
is a distracting exercise.
The reality is, millions of black people
in remote parts of the South
could not leave the farms
they were being held on.
If they did, they were subject
to arrest by the sheriff
and, if they were arrested,
they would then be returned
to the very same farms, oftentimes,
in chains, receiving nothing.
That is slavery.
That's a form of slavery.
But, the criminal justice system
and the use of the courts
to force African-Americans
back into labor
was only one element of the new kind
of slavery that soon pervaded the South.
Sharecropping began, for instance,
as a form of free labor
in which a farmer would go to work--
would work a portion of the land
owned by another man
in return for a share of the crop.
But the laws that were
being passed by the South
and the threat of being arrested
and forced into a much more terrible
kind of penalty in a coal mine
or on a prison farm somewhere.
The threat of having that happen
to any African-American man
meant that he could not defy
the wishes of the white landowner
where he was working. Again and again,
for millions of African-Americans
working as sharecroppers, they and
their families were as effectively held
and immobilized on those farms,
in the 1890s and into the 1900s,
as their grandparents had been
held as slaves in the same places
before the Civil War.
Almost all sharecroppers were
never able to pay back the debts
to the landowners on
whose land they worked.
They effectively were peons, even though
they were not called that at the time.