Negative Effects Of Sharecropping

Although slavery was declared over after the passing of the thirteenth amendment, African Americans were not being treated with the respect or equality they deserved. Socially, politically and economically, African American people were not being given equal opportunities as white people. They had certain laws directed at them, which held them back from being equal to their white peers. They also had certain requirements, making it difficult for many African Americans to participate in the opportunity to vote for government leaders. Although they were freed from slavery, there was still a long way to go for equality through America’s reconstruction plan.

We all know that this law did not truly provide “same accommodations.” Plessy was a biracial male who was majority white and only 1/3 black who was arrested due to the “separate but equal law” in Louisiana after he sat in the white section of the train. He was allowed to buy a ticket, but wasn’t allowed to sit there. He tried to appeal the charges, but was found guilty three times because it was said that the “separate but equal” was constitutional. The 14th amendment did not come in to play in regards to the “separate but equal” phenomenon because it was said that the SBE law did not violate the amendment because people still had equal rights, just in separate facilities and ways.

During the mid-to-late-1900s, there was a lot of controversy surrounding race. Although slavery had been abolished around a century ago, many people still did not treat African Americans as equals. Even the supreme court had declared that white people and black people should remain “separate but equal”, in their landmark case Plessy Vs Ferguson (“Separate but Equal - Separate Is Not Equal.”, n.d.). The “separate but equal” doctrine meant that African Americans were to be given separate facilities and opportunities from white people, given that they were equal to each other.

The Plessy vs Ferguson doctrine implies it is, “merely a legal distinction without conflicting with the 13th Amendment”. The Plessy vs Ferguson was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the Plessy vs Ferguson doctrine that racially segregated public facilities were only legal if blacks and whites were both equally welcome. In 1951, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools”.

In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law” (Newton, 2006, p. 294). Consequently, Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine stood firm

Looking at the period in which the primary source was written it was a time when “effective emancipation in the cotton South forced a hasty reorganization of the black labor force to secure the harvest.” “Planters…offered money wages or crop shares plus specified rations and garden rights to freedmen for resumption of slave-style work gang employment in the cotton field” The first primary source that are to be examined deals with sharecropping: “Working on Shares” by Henry Blake. This source is a first-hand account of a former slave, Henry Blake about life in the sharecropping system. Once they were freed, they worked on shares and then they rented.

After the Civil War, between the years, 1865 through 1870 the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were adopted by the United States. They abolished slavery, provided equal protection for freed slaves, and prohibited discrimination of colored voters. These Amendments granted former southern slaves the freedom to pursue happiness, but in 1868, the “separate but equal” doctrine kept these amendments from bearing fruit. For nearly a century the “separate but equal” doctrine promoted segregation, and suggested that it was constitutional to keep blacks and whites separate as long as they had equal rights to education, public transportation, and restrooms, but the definition of equality in the south was very vague. Segregation included

Sharecropping allowed “a black family to rent a part of a plantation, with the crop divided between worker and owner at the end of the year.” This helped white farmers which were growing 40 percent of cotton in the United States. Some Southerners turned to violence. Smaller groups of white people attacked, and even killed, blacks if they stepped out of line, or did something that the white people didn’t like. Eventually, the Ku Klux Klan, aka the KKK, formed.

Maceo Cardinale Kwik Reconstruction Reconstruction was the twelve years after the civil war. Those twelve years were full of readjustment fixing the ruin the United States had fallen into. The problems that had the United states in disarray were how to, rebuild the South, reunite the states, and ensure the rights and protection of the newly freed African Americans. The civil war left the South in shambles, and newly freed slaves struggled to adjust to their new freedom. Most Southerners hated reconstruction and everything else about the North.

The creation of the emancipation proclamation and reconstruction period offered hope to those who were once slaves. Essentially, the end of this treatment led to the loss of a strong capital for plantation owners. Reconstruction became a mission for white southerners to redeem the south and the beginning of a new labor force (Jelks). Post emancipation gave ‘freed’ people false hope and made them fight with strength to make their imprint on the world. James Brown, the King of Soul, went through life experiencing criminalization, labor, self-help, religion, politics and fear similar to that of his ‘freed’ counterparts.

Reconstruction failed to bring any land reform of importance to the South this left African Americans in an inherently unequal state with no opportunities to meet their basic human needs. They were unable to get ahead in life or move on from their enslaved past. African Americans had to remain dependent on their former owners. Sharecropping became the legal form of slavery. It kept African Americans tied to the land they worked which was owned by rich white

The Reconstruction Era of American history was plagued by many problems. One of the most important problems being the recently released from slavery Freedmen. Freedmen were in a tricky situation in which they had just been released from their owner and had nowhere to go, but the Federal Government made many successful attempts to help them out. The Government helped alleviate all the problems Freedmen had from their finances to basic needs and rights, and in doing so, made the period of reconstruction more helpful than harmful for Freedmen. The events of reconstruction were helpful to freedmen as they were not only freed from slavery, they were given rights directly from the federal government.

The first African American leaders in the South Came from the ranks of antebellum free blacks who were joint by norther blacks to support Reconstruction. Blanche K Bruce an ex slave established a school for freedmen and in 1874 he became Mississippi’s second black U.S. senator. African American speakers who were financed by the Republican Party, spread out into the plantation districts and recruited former slaves to take part in politics. In South Carolina, African Americans constituted a majority in the lower house of legislature in 1868. Over the reconstruction twenty African Americans served in state administrations as Governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, or lesser offices.

Evaluating Cruelty: Sharecropping and Slavery “After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping” (Pollard para. 1). Sharecropping is the action of allowing workers, called sharecroppers, to work on someone else’s farm. This let former slaves find jobs; however, farmers found loopholes to exploit the former slaves. Because of this, the workers were rarely paid the amount they needed for their needs.

The ruling thus lent high judicial support to racial and ethnic discrimination and led to wider spread of the segregation between Whites and Blacks in the Southern United States. The great oppressive consequence from this was discrimination against African American minority from the socio-political opportunity to share the same facilities with the mainstream Whites, which in most of the cases the separate facilities for African Americans were inferior to those for Whites in actuality. The doctrine of “separate but equal” hence encourages two-tiered pluralism in U.S. as it privileged the non-Hispanic Whites over other racial and ethnic minority