Sharecropping Was Like Slavery Under Another Name
Finding housing and employment became a matter of freedom.
Vagrancy laws in North Carolina allowed the sheriff to arrest Black people who were unemployed and looking for work. Some were forced into working at prison farms like this one in Durham, circa 1880.
Courtesy Durham Historic Photographic Archives, North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library
Both Black and white farmers became sharecroppers, renting small plots of land – shares – to grow crops.
In return, they would give a portion of their crops to their landlord.
Most sharecroppers barely made ends meet and stayed in constant debt to landowners.
White and Black sharecroppers working tobacco fields.
Courtesy Alvin T. Parnell photographs of Durham, NC, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University
“We were sharecropping on halves. The stock belonged to the owner; the old man paid for half the fertilizer… I was raised up here in Durham so I came back here because it was home.”
– John Patterson, Black sharecropper and tobacco worker, born in Bahama, North Carolina
Black sharecroppers shucking corn for their white landlord, near Cedar Grove, 1939 Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Finding housing and employment became a matter of freedom.
Vagrancy laws in North Carolina allowed the sheriff to arrest Black people who were unemployed and looking for work. Some were forced into working at prison farms like this one in Durham, circa 1880.
Courtesy Durham Historic Photographic Archives, North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library
Both Black and white farmers became sharecroppers, renting small plots of land – shares – to grow crops.
In return, they would give a portion of their crops to their landlord.
Most sharecroppers barely made ends meet and stayed in constant debt to landowners.
White and Black sharecroppers working tobacco fields.
Courtesy Alvin T. Parnell photographs of Durham,
NC, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, Duke University
“We were sharecropping on halves. The stock belonged to the owner; the old man paid for half the fertilizer… I was raised up here in Durham so I came back here because it was home.”
-John Patterson, Black sharecropper and tobacco worker, born in Bahama, North Carolina
