Labor Struggle of a Black Sharecropper

The landlord-tenant system of sharecropping favored the white man; in reality, it was slavery in another guise. The relationship between owner and sharecropper was one of exploitation, the white owner in most cases exploiting the black tenant. Theoretically, blacks should have been able to purchase and contract out land, just as whites did, but, as Nate explains, whites wrote the rules of the contract in such a manner that blacks could not win. The cotton sold by blacks was not "worth" as much as cotton sold by whites. Therefore, even if a black were fortunate enough to own a farm, his cotton would not be worth that of a white man's. In addition, black labor was paid less.

Nate explains these discrepancies in his section on "deeds":

Colored man's cotton weren't worth as much as a white man's cotton less'n it come to the buyer in the whi

. . .
tice for all. The whites who were pushed out of the tenant farms in the post-war South migrated to northern urban areas where they found factory jobs in a more industrial economy. They gradually left the South to make it in the North, leaving behind wealthier whites--and in the South that generally meant those who were land owners, the South still being a rural agrarian economy. Blacks too, fled to northern cities, because those who remained (even if they were fortunate enough to own their own land, as Nate did), shared little in the profits of a system that deprived them of the authority to sell their crops at a white man's price. Nate was determined to stay on the land, believing that his labor had given him a lasting claim to it, and visa versa. In fact, it was Nate's prevailing will over the land which enabled him to hang on. How did those who remained on the land adjust to the barriers already discussed? The answer is common: through toil and endless trouble. Nate bemoans the fact that public jobs began to replace labor on the land, spawning a lazy generation of do-nothings who don't know the value of hard work. He scorns the black man who has given up his rural roots to work in a factory up north (537). Public co
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Approximate Word count = 1656
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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