What is sharecropping and how did it limit the opportunities of the African Americans?

Answer 1

Sharecropping is the practice of a large landowner to permit farmers and their families to live on a plot of land, loan them money, food, tools, seed, and other necessities, in exchange for a portion of the crops produced on the land. Sharecropping is not in itself a bad thing. It is still practiced in various forms throughout the world.

Sharecropping was used to limit the rights and opportunities of African Americans by essentially tying them to the land. The sharecropper was nearly always in debt and therefore was obligated to continue to remain on the land to work off the debt. Sharecroppers did not own land or often anything except their clothing, so even if they worked off their debt they could little afford to leave. Sharecropping in the South usually meant that children either did not have schools or attended school only rarely when not working in the fields. This greatly limited opportunities for further generations.

Because sharecroppers were nearly all uneducated, the landowners often took extreme advantage of them. The rates of interest on loaned money or goods would be terribly high (not unlike the practices of credit card companies and used car dealers today). Some landowners forced the sharecropper to sell the products of the land (cotton, tobacco, grain, etc.) only through them, and therefore made certain the sharecropper never got a fair price.

The combination of these practices led to many social negatives. Blacks were constrained to nearly permanent serfdom.

Some American sayings that relate to sharecropping:

Fly by night - The practice of escaping one's debts by fleeing in the middle of the night.

Move Southern style - Essentially the same as fly by night.

Keep them in their place - An insulting phrase implying that Blacks or poor Whites ought to be kept 'in their place', that is, on the sharecropping farm where they could not advance.

Sometimes 'comes a cropper' (meaning the arrival of misfortune) is associated with sharecropping, but that is not correct. That phrase derives from Scandinavian words for bump and bruise -- it meant a fall from a horse originally. It however fits with the situation that sharecroppers were in, battered by usury, abusive practices, the Klan, etc.

Answer 2

Sharecropping severely limited economic opportunities for the freedman. Since sharecropping did not include owning the land or even the crops that were produced, freedman were once again tied to the land. Worse, when they needed to buy equipment or seed for the next season, they borrowed from white landlords and often ended up owing money to their landlords so they had to remain to try to pay back their debt and ended up in a cycle of debt. Pictures of sharecroppers look similar to slavery since a white overseer remained on the land and entire families had to farm to make enough money to survive. This was also a problem because of severe crop failures after the Civil War which set up many freedman in debt. Sharecropping offered very little autonomy and was another way that African-Americans were set up to fail and as an economic inferior group.

Answer 3

Sharecropping means that a person farms property belonging to someone else for a share of the crop. It is a way that a farmer without land can earn many and a land-owner can get a return from his fields without out farming it himself. Plantation owners lost their slave labor and so had more land than then could farm themselves and no cash with which to hire workers. So share-cropping was an answer. I would think sharecropping would have about the same effect on African Americans as on anybody else.