top of page

Sharecroppers- Tenant - Migrant Farm Workers

Sharecropping was for the landless people.
It was kin to slavery but with a different name.
Sharecropping was based on the business deal that the white landowner would "rent" out plots of land and Black people would farm the land giving a large portion of the money the crops brought in to the white landowner.

Sharecroppers- Tenant - Migrant Farm Workers

Tenant farming has been in the US from the 1870s to the present. Tenants typically bring their own tools and animals. To that extent it is distinguished from being a sharecropper, which is a tenant farmer who usually provides no capital and pays fees with crops.
.
The term “migrant farmworker” includes people working temporarily or seasonally in farm fields, orchards, canneries, plant nurseries, fish/seafood packing plants, and more.
.
Sharecropping was for the landless people.
It was kin to slavery but with a different name.
Sharecropping was based on the business deal that the white landowner would "rent" out plots of land and Black people would farm the land giving a large portion of the money the crops brought in to the white landowner.

It was backbreaking work, and many, but not all, of the white landowners were cruel and violent to the Black sharecroppers, often cheating them out of their fare share of the work they did. For many Black people after Emancipation and those generations born free this was the only work and housing they could find.

This system was set up so that the Black sharecroppers always stayed in debt hardly being able to make ends meet.
Which also kept the Black people in another form of slavery for many years during racial segregation and the creation of Jim and Jane Crow laws

bottom of page