ivided up into smaller units, each worked by a black family. Under the sharecropping system, the white landowner kept a share of the year's crop for himself instead of paying wages or collecting rent. Because it suited the landowners better than any other arrangement, and because blacks had too little money or power to escape from it, the sharecrop system would dominate Southern agriculture for generations to come. Thus the sharecropping system perpetuated the white mindset that whites were meant to keep blacks subordinate: "Blacks' quest for economic independence . . . threatened the foundations of the Southern political economy" (Foner 48). Otherwise, according to the racist point of view, either the black race would reduce the white
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