#sharecroppers
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On a cold December morning in 1931, a short, elderly Black woman set out on a 24km (15-mile) walk from her homestead in Alabama, United States, on a quest for justice. The long trek to the court in Selma was no small undertaking for a person in her mid-70s. But Matilda McCrear was determined to go and make her legal claim for compensation for the horrors that she and her family had been through.
Until her death 85 years ago on January 13, 1940, Matilda was the last surviving passenger on the last-ever slave ship bound from the West African coast to North America in late 1859...
Her story began many decades before and thousands of miles away from that sharecropping homestead. Originally named Abake – “born to be loved by all” – the girl later renamed Matilda by her American “owner” came into the world circa 1857, among the Tarkar people of the West African interior.
In 1859, at the age of two, little Abake was captured along with her mother (later renamed Grace), her three older sisters and some other relatives, by troops of the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now Benin. Torn away from the rest of their family, they were victims of an age-old regional warfare which underpinned an equally ancient but persistent trade in slavery reaching across North and East Africa, the Ottoman Empire and eventually the Americas...
...Foster’s ship, Clotilda – a two-masted schooner, 26 metres (86 feet) in length – is now infamous as the last ship known to have carried slaves across the Atlantic to North America. By this time it was an illegal journey, for while slavery continued across the southeast of the US (and in parts of South America), the importation of slaves had been prohibited since 1808. The Clotilda set sail from Ouidah late in the year, purportedly carrying lumber – the 11-man crew being promised double their normal wage to keep quiet about the true contents, as per an entry in Foster’s journal.
Their route across the Atlantic was known as the “Middle Passage”, making up the second part of a triangular trade route connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas. Ships carried weapons and manufactured goods from Europe to the “slave coast” of West Africa on the first part of the round trip; in the Middle Passage, that cargo was traded for enslaved Africans who were transported to the US and South America, where they were usually sold by auction; and on the final course, the vessels returned to Europe usually laden with cotton, tobacco and sugarcane...
...Foster navigated the Clotilda, now carrying 108 slaves, into the port of Mobile, Alabama under cover of darkness in early 1860. He had it towed up the Mobile River to Twelvemile Island, where the captive Africans were transferred to a river steamboat. Foster wrote in his journal that the Clotilda was then burned to destroy any evidence...
...At Twelvemile Island, Abake, her mother and her 10-year-old sister were handed over by Foster to one of the financial backers of Clotilda, a wealthy plantation owner by the name of Memorable Creagh.
In another heartbreaking separation, Abake’s two other sisters (whose names are unknown) were sent elsewhere, never to be seen again – a typically brutal fate for so many of those regarded as a mere commodity...
...Matilda was still a small child when the Civil War broke out in the US in April 1861. Alabama, along with Virginia, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, seceded from the US and formed the Confederate States of America – on the grounds that the institution of slavery, the lifeblood of southern economies, was threatened by the federal government in Washington
President Abraham Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that all enslaved people in the Confederate states were free. This had no immediate effect on Matilda and her family, as the Civil War continued to rage. But when the Confederates were defeated on June 19, 1865, Matilda and her family were liberated...
...But after 1865, freed slaves did not find themselves in a friendly world. Many white Americans reacted with indignant fury to the idea of Black people being their equals. In a harsh and unwelcoming world, there were few options for uneducated ex-slaves other than to remain on the plantations as “sharecroppers” – a system whereby a tenant farmed a portion of land in exchange for a share of the crop. Sharecropping often involved contracts that trapped tenants in debt and poverty and which in practice was not far removed from actual slavery.
Upon her emancipation, Matilda and her family thus became supposedly free people. But, as Martin Luther King Jr pointed out in a 1968 sermon, “Emancipation for the Negro was only a proclamation. It was not a fact. The Negro still lives in chains: the chains of economic slavery, the chains of social segregation, the chains of political disenfranchisement.”
During the post-Civil War period of “Reconstruction”, many new federal laws promoting racial equality were quickly met by local state measures designed to keep Black people “in their place” and ensure that white people remained ascendant. This is seen in the reaction, at the state level, to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution.
The 13th Amendment of 1865 officially ended slavery in all US states and territories. Formerly enslaved people were legally freed, while the Freedmen’s Bureau was established to aid freed slaves through the provision of food, housing, medical aid, schooling and legal support.
To counter this, southern states, including Matilda’s home of Alabama, enacted the so-called “Black Codes”, curtailing the right of African Americans to own property, conduct business, buy and lease land or move freely in public spaces. The Black Codes forced many Black people into newly exploitative labour arrangements such as sharecropping.
A central element of the Black Codes was “vagrancy” laws. Through a system known as “convict leasing”, many African-American boys and men were arrested for minor offences such as vagrancy, imprisoned, and then leased out to work for private businesses. This created a new system of forced labour which again was little more than slavery. Convict leasing was legally rooted in the so-called “exception clause” of the 13th Amendment which states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
Convict leasing is prevalent in the US to this very day, with most working prisoners – still overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic – being paid only a few cents per hour. And even upon their release, ex-convicts have always faced immense hurdles to finding employment, getting credit, doing business or buying property due to their prison records...
...Matilda later entered a common-law partnership with a German-born man called Jacob Schuler and had a total of 14 children, 10 of whom survived into adulthood. What befell the other four is unknown. Whether she was prevented from marrying her partner by the ban on interracial marriage, or chose that arrangement, is also not known. In any case, Matilda appears not to have benefitted financially from the relationship, as she remained a sharecropper, living in the vicinity of Selma, Alabama, for most of her working life. At some point, she changed her surname from Creagh to McCrear, perhaps to distance herself from her enslaver and as an assertion of her own identity. Over the generations, the family surname has seen a number of further variations, including Crear, Creah, Creagher and McCreer...
...The Selma Times-Journal news story provides a vivid description of Matilda: “She walks with a vigorous stride. Her kinky hair is almost white and is plaited in small tufts and with bright-coloured string … Her voice is low and husky, but clear. Age shows most in her eyes … yet her … skin is firm and smooth.”
The article went on to relate that “Tildy has vigor and spirit in spite of her years … endurance and a natural aptitude for agriculture inherited from the Tarkar tribe, made [her] a thrifty farmer.”
Durkin writes that Matilda’s story is particularly remarkable “because she resisted what was expected of a Black woman in the US South in the years after emancipation. She did not get married. Instead, she had a decades-long common-law marriage … Even though she left West Africa when she was a toddler, she appears throughout her life to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style, a style presumably taught to her by her mother.”...
...John Crear, a retired hospital administrator and community leader now in his late 80s, was born in the house Matilda resided in, and her funeral is one of his earliest memories. His grandmother’s strong character apparently passed into family lore. “I was told she was quite rambunctious”, he said.
He discovered more about Matilda when he and his wife carried out some research of their own into the family history. “I had no idea she’d been on the Clotilda”, he said. “It came as a real surprise. Her story gives me mixed emotions because if she hadn’t been brought here, I wouldn’t be here. But it’s hard to read about what she experienced.”
Matilda waited all her life for some form of justice and it would be another 14 years before the civil rights movement began to challenge the systemic racism she faced. Iconic leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X pointed out the hypocritical gap between the ideals of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the actual lived reality of African Americans.
In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X demanded: “… our right on this earth … to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society … which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
Although Matilda missed out on witnessing any of this, her grandson was active in the civil rights movement. “You can read about slavery and be detached from it,” he told National Geographic. “But when it’s your family that is involved, it becomes up close and very real.” During the Civil Rights movement, he was arrested and imprisoned on charges of assault and battery – for the offence of stopping a white man who attempted to stuff a live snake down his throat.
Indeed, many civil rights campaigners faced extreme violence from the police and the National Guard, leaving many injured, imprisoned or even dead, as in the case of both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X.
But their sacrifices were not in vain. By the mid-1960s, the entire plethora of Jim Crow statutes had been taken down. Segregation in public schools was deemed unconstitutional in the 1954 case of Brown v Board of Education; discriminatory electoral practices such as literacy tests and grandfather clauses were banned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and all other forms of segregation and employment discrimination were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
These were statutory measures aiming to eradicate prejudice in the official sphere. However positive their effect, deeper-rooted racism at the societal level remains a feature of US life.
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This is just excerpts from the article. I want everyone to read it in whole. The last surviving (official) chattel slave in the United States only died in nineteen forty. My grandmother--who's still alive--was a teenager at the time. This isn't ancient history, this is all too fresh and lingering.
#Matilda McCrear#Abake#slavery#chattel slavery#American history#American south#sharecroppers#prison labor#penal slavery#Civil Rights#today in history#i cried my eyes out reading this
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Son of Sharecropper. Mississippi Country, Arkansas. 1935
Photo: Arthur Rothstein- Library of Congress
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Erskine Caldwell: Beyond Tobacco Road
A look today at the much-neglected progressive Southern author Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987), born 120 years ago today. Caldwell was decidedly not neglected in his own time; that’s the whole point. His most popular books and adaptations thereof broke records; we’ve had dozens of occasions to mention his most famous one on this blog. To sell that point, we’ll talk about the famous works first, and…

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#author#book#Erskine Caldwell#God&039;s Little Acre#novel#sharecroppers#south#Tobacco Road#writer#You Have Seen Their Faces
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On the night of September 30, 1919, approximately 100 Black farmers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Phillips County, Arkansas. Many of the farmers were sharecroppers on white-owned plantations in the area, and the meeting was held to discuss ways they could organize to demand fairer payments for their crops.
Black labor unions such as the Progressive Farmers were deeply resented among white landowners throughout the country because unions threatened to weaken white aristocratic power. The union also made efforts to subvert racial divisions in labor relations and had hired a white attorney to negotiate with land owners for better cotton prices.
Knowing that Black union organizing often attracted opposition, Black men stood as armed guards around the church while the Phillips County meeting took place. When a group of white people from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad attempted to intrude and spy on the meeting, the guards held them back and a shootout erupted. At least two white men were killed, and enraged white mobs quickly formed.
The mobs descended on the nearby Black town of Elaine, Arkansas, destroying homes and businesses and attacking any Black people in their path over the coming days. Terrified Black residents, including women, children, and the elderly, fled their homes and hid for their lives in nearby woods and fields. A responding federal troop regiment claimed only two Black people were killed, but many reports challenged the white soldiers’ credibility and accused them of participating in the massacre. Today, historians estimate hundreds of Black people were killed in the massacre.
When the violence was quelled, 67 Black people were arrested and charged with inciting violence, while dozens more faced other charges. No white attackers were prosecuted, but 12 Black union members convicted of riot-related charges were sentenced to death. The NAACP, along with local African American lawyer Scipio Africanus Jones, represented the men on appeal and successfully obtained reversals of all of their death sentences.
#history#white history#us history#black history#am yisrael chai#jumblr#republicans#democrats#September 30 1919#September 30#Progressive Farmers#Household Union of America#Phillips County#Arkansas#sharecroppers#plantations#plantation#work#working class
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#Black sharecroppers#American South#Vintage photographs#1939-1941#sharecroppers#Black American History#Black history
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Leaving Henry: The Poignant Life Journey | Excerpt from Chapter One
The Author and her Mother Hello Everyone! My latest novel, Leaving Henry will be available on Amazon.com any day now. It’s been a long road writing my mother’s amazing story, and I can’t wait to share it with all of you. Below is an excerpt from chapter one! Enjoy and don’t forget to purchase your copy on Amazon next month! CHAPTER ONE I woke up on my fifth birthday wet and smelling like pee.…
#American#escapism#Family#Farming#Friendship#Henry#Hope#Humor#life#Nonfiction#nostalgia#Sharecroppers#Tennessee
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The Jordan side of my family were sharecroppers. My grandfather Willie Bo Jordan made it through the third grade. He then went to work in the fields with his Mother. His great-grandchildren are Ph.D. and business owner, another a Television producer for an NPR station and Photographer, and the other a graphic designer for a national magazine and a multi-instrument musician. And still we rise.
#farming#black farmers#sharecroppers#vital community#vitalportal#vital information exchange#additional information#thevitalportal#vital media#blacklivesmatter#blacktwitter#vital politics
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Man eating on the porch. Clarksdale, Ms. - 1937
Photographer: Dorthea Lange
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Twelve-year-old son of a cotton sharecropper near Cleveland, Mississippi, 1937 - Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965), American
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Arthur Rothstein. Sharecropper’s Wife and Child. Arkansas. 1935
Follow my new AI-related project «Collective memories»
#BW#Black and White#黒と白#Schwarz und weiß#Noir et blanc#Preto e branco#vintage#retro#Arthur Rothstein#Sharecropper’s Wife#motherhood#Arkansas#1935#1930s#30s#kids#children#crianças#gamins#enfants#Kinder#子供たち#児童
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Fannie Lou Hamer was the youngest of twenty children and was only six years old when she began working in cotton fields. Her efforts to register to vote in Mississippi in 1962 and 1963 led to full-time activism. As an adult, through an encounter with activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she learned about the power of voting rights to effect change in the structural barriers that families like hers faced.
Because of her views about Black Americans’ constitutional rights, Hamer experienced several harrowing attacks, including a drive-by shooting at a friend’s home and a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in Winona, Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while she was trying to register to vote.
One day in August 1964, Fannie found herself in the hallway outside of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel suite in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Several national civil rights leaders and political operatives were crammed in his suite, strategizing over Black representation at the Democratic National Convention. Prior to the convention, Hamer had helped to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in order to challenge the Democrats’ all-white Mississippi delegation.
Even though Hamer’s home state was under the spotlight, there was apparently no room for her in the talks. When an associate told Hamer that she should “listen to the leaders,” she asked: “Who is the leader?” The men around her with money and degrees actively tried to sideline her. Yet, it was Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper with limited formal education and limited financial resources, who ended up stealing the show at the convention and captivating the nation with an electrifying speech about voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans.
Born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi and died March 14, 1977 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, at the age of 59.
* Photo: Fannie Lou Hamer (left) with activist Ella Baker, 1964
#fannie lou hamer#love#civil rights leader#womens rights#right to vote#mississippi#black lives#martin luther king jr#sharecropper#cotton feilds#activism#ella baker#im sick and tired of being sick and tired#malcom x#1960s
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Evicted sharecropper’s wife. Butler County, Missouri, November 1939
Photo: Arthur Rothstein
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for historical accuracy i must create a family of black ocs to put in rio bravo
#typewriter dings#they'd probably be sharecroppers though damn. i have to see if there were other options besides maid services and sharecropping
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I thought about the NCR Sharecropper Farms and Concluded they should not Exist.
Strong opening line, 'ey? How's ol' Delafiseaseses gonna justify that?
Quite easily, actually. Y'see some people misunderstand the NCR Sharecropper Farms, they think it provides food to the Mojave. Not true. It provides food to the NCR, clues in the name, really. Its a Sharecrop, the NCR gets some of the crop and the sharecroppers get the rest of their crop as payment, the portion the NCR takes goes to NCR Military bases. As Romanowski says 'A lot of the crops grown here support the various NCR camps in the region - McCarran, Golf, and Forlorn Hope, to name a few. We can't have wastelanders popping in here for a free meal, so my squad and I are assigned to keep things from going to hell.' and when Romanowski says 'Wastelanders' he means 'people from the Mojave Wasteland' of course.
Do the sharecroppers sell their crops to Mojave citizens? Possibly, but remember all the sharecroppers are NCR citizens brought over by the 'Thaler Act', nobody from the Mojave directly benefits from this arrangement.
You may think 'Well, not like anyone in the Mojave before was using the land.' possibly wrong. While he's not from the Mojave (and is an unrepentant Enclave fascist, but that's irrelevant) Orion Moreno has this to say 'I came out here to get away from them - didn't work out so well. Next thing I know, I'm squatting in "their" land. Never mind that I'd already been living here for years.', and when he says 'years' he could mean up to over 3 decades. So we've got to wonder... was the land unoccupied? Moreno is a stubborn old Enclave soldier, he wouldn't scare easy, he gets harassed by the NCR, as he says when you first meet him 'Bah. Looks like I forgot to lock the doors again. If you're with the NCR, get out. This place is mine, and I'm not leaving.' or, if you am in NCR faction armour 'Look, trooper, I was living in this house long before your farms got set up. Don't even think about evicting me.' most people would be forced off by these tactics. So it is entirely possible the NCR has displaced Mojave residents to set up their precious farm.
Both quests involving the Sharecropper Farm also include a backdrop of NCR vs Mojave Locals. The most obvious is, of course, The White Wash. The Westside Co-Op, an actual local community farming effort (which does have some New Californians, but they're unaffiliated with the NCR), is only surviving because of the syphoning of water from the Sharecroppers by Tom Anderson. The water from the local water system that the NCR took over, I might add. Why do they get to claim ownership of Lake Mead's water and the Vegas water system?
And the second, Hard Luck Blues is more indirect. The NCR isn't at fault at all for this, the Vault 34 Civil War damaged their reactor and that was entirely on them. But the final choice between saving the Vault 34 Survivors or dealing with the radiation leak caused by the Vault 34 Civil War killing the survivors. So it is literally saving an NCR Asset or saving people who for over 200 years have lived in the Mojave.
Now, I'm not saying the Sharecroppers themselves deserve to suffer lower than needed water rations or radiation in their soil. They didn't set this up, they're just working class NCR citizens trying to survive, but, the thing is, the Sharecroppers can just... leave. And they do if these quests are resolved in ways that hurt the Farms.
After the White Wash siding with Anderson/Westside the affected sharecropper Trent Bascom says he's quitting because 'I wouldn't be able to meet the quota, and the NCR would kick me out of my job, anyway. Nah, it's better I get out on my own terms.' and he's even got a plan for his future 'I hear the Brahmin ranchers out in Redding are looking for some hard workers, so I might try there first. I hate working with Brahmin, though.' so, yeah, that sucks for him, but he's got a future. He may not like that future, but its more of a future than the Westsiders have if they lose their Co-Op.
And after Hard Luck Blues you can find some Sharecroppers out front of the Big Horn Saloon in Boulder City. The named member of this group is a woman named Anne, she has this to say 'We're heading back home. I hope our troops do the same. This land can't be saved. Trying to grow crops in this heat, with so little water, is bad enough, but now we've got radiation seeping into the farmlands east of New Vegas. We're done. Let the people of these hell-hole deal with their problems, I say.' and, y'know, I agree. Maybe the people of the Mojave should deal with their problems and not have a military force from somewhere else claiming their land and water? Especially since the area is still disputed at this time. They're literally fighting a bloody war which they have a 3/4 chance of losing during all of this.
To put this all in a shorter way: The NCR Sharecropper Farm's existence is an example of NCR colonialism.
Like, it's textbook fucking colonialism. They forcefully took over part of a land that's not theirs, brought in their own people to 'settle' the land and violently keep the locals out of it all, who suffer because of it. I've said before that the NCR playacts the USA and they certainly playact it accurately.
So, unless you're doing an NCR playthrough, I'd say its probably best to side against the Sharecropper Farm in every instance because the NCR Sharecropper Farms should not exist. It sucks for the Sharecroppers, but they'd be out of the job when the NCR withdraws anyway. Probably best for everyone if they get out before the NCR Military does.
#fallout#fallout new vegas#new vegas#hard luck blues#the white wash#ncr#ncr sharecropper farms#trent bascom#anne#westside#vault 34#orion moreno#new california republic
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Walker Evans (American, 1903 - 1975), photographer
Sharecropper's Family, Hale County, Alabama / Bud Fields and His Family, Hale County, Alabama / Bud Woods and His Family, 1936
Getty Museum
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