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.