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