Sharecroppers, Sharecropping Quotes

I was a sharecropper's son. That's as low as you can get on the totem pole.

The condition of white people in this State is such that they must labor in competition with the negro laborer.

The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed. No one—neither tenants nor their landlords—had any problem making children and women work in the fields.

In the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange produced images of sharecroppers and Okies, which drew attention both to the conditions in which these unfortunates found themselves and to their heroic fortitude.

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

The crisis of the 1930s and the populist reactions of that time must not be forgotten.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.

And we never got the mule, let alone the forty acres.

I learned conservatism through my grandfather; I didn't know that was the name. I didn't know these were conservative principles. Starting his life on a sharecropping farm. Working tremendously hard. Five years old, picking cotton and laying tobacco out to dry on a farm, and today he now owns that farm.

My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I'd go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I'd sing and play.

My grandmother was a sharecropper. That wasn't even that long ago! My grandma was a sharecropper.

Dependency had long defined the South. Since the 1870s, impoverished sharecroppers and convict laborers, white as well as black, had clung to the bottom rung of the social order. It may be hard for us to fathom, but the convict population was no better off than southern slaves had been.

American Pesants

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something.

Madam Walker was a master marketer. But her brilliance was in taking it to another level by training women, by traveling, by making very motivational speeches and by providing independent income for women who otherwise would have to be maids and sharecroppers.

Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here.

Have you read 'The Grapes of Wrath?' That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the tops of their cars in the movie? That was the way it was.

In 1932, the predecessor organization, the CDC, took 299 black sharecroppers from the South who had syphilis. They offered them free healthcare, hot lunches, and free burial. They said you can only come to us for healthcare. These were men who were sharecroppers, and they had syphilis. They were never told they had syphilis.

Please remember that my great grandmother was a slave. My grandmother was a sharecropper. My mother was a factory worker.

My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s and, therefore, was born into slavery but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.

I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.