Collection
Sharecropping and Civil Rights
Although the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, the lack of money in the American South in the wake of the Civil War made wage labor scarce as well. Sharecropping, in which tenant farmers paid a portion of their crop yield in exchange for use of the land, kept plantations running. And it left African American farmers in a state of constant precarity that made it even more difficult for them to challenge Jim Crow system well into the 20th century.
Even in the 1930s, in a political climate more open to unionizing, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters could not count on support from white trade unions, so they allied with the farmworkers in the Alabama Sharecroppers Union and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union for advocacy at the intersection of labor and civil rights.
Despite the prevalence of Black sharecroppers, and the existence of many New Deal photographs of people of color, the Farm Security Administration's curation of photography presented the victims of the Great Depression as predominantly white, in images still etched into Americans' collective memory.
