Sharecropping became the new means of enslavement in the South.

As the South reeled from the loss of the Civil War and sought to rebuild its economic base, sharecropping became the dominant system of labor that replaced the old slave-based plantation structure. Sharecropping agreements divided old plantations into smaller units of land, which were then leased to poor white and Black farmers with nearly half of the land being leased to African American families. These families worked the land (usually 30 to 50 acres) in return for a portion of the crop share. As Edward Royce (1988) wrote,

Freed people remained dependent on planters, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of land, and planters remained dependent on their former slaves, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of labor. Each tried, unsuccessful, to break the monopoly possessed by the other. (Royce, 1988, p. 2-4; 181)

Advances for Black families ended when the Federal Government withdrew its support for Reconstruction in 1876.

When the federal government withdrew its support of Reconstruction in 1876, the period of post-civil war growth for Black people ended. Local and state laws were quickly passed that racially segregated Black men, women, and children from much of white life in the South.

A racial caste system, referred to as “Jim Crow,” replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South.

Known as “Jim Crow,” these laws, regulations, and social requirements relegated Blacks to second-class citizens (Hoelscher, 2003, p. 659; Woodward, 1955). A racial caste system replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South. Mindy Thompson Fullilove (2016) describes Jim Crow in the following way: “between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks” (pp. 22-23).

Even in the midst of such deprivation, African Americans continued to assert their rights and push back against the Jim Crow-ism that sought to control their lives in the American South.

Their success kept Jim Crow in check. Geographer Steven Hoelscher (2003) notes “its [Jim Crow] power was never monolithic or complete; Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself in response to African-American (and occasionally white) defiance and resistance” (p. 660).