My grandmother, born in 1898, worked as a child sharecropper near Galveston, TX, hoeing watermelons at six, before working in a boarding house for twenty-one tenants when she was in grade school and high school. Despite that, she graduated from high school.
My mother’s birth parents were sharecroppers in Eastern Colorado, and her mother died in childbirth during the Depression, leaving three children. The father, overwhelmed, abandoned the children; neighbors, including my grandmother, later found them. Their lives, though challenging, were often still better than those being born Black in the Deep South. Whites could attend school, receive hospital treatment, and vote.
Sunflower County, Mississippi’s Black population was 70-80% during the first forty years of the 20th century. The agricultural economy relied on Black labor in cotton farming. Cotton sharecroppers like Hamer planted, weeded, and cultivated, harvested cotton and other crops such as corn and vegetables, ginning the cotton and maintaining the equipment, fences, and livestock. Fannie Lou Hamer attended a school for Black sharecroppers until she was thirteen during the winter months. At thirteen, she had to quit school to help her parents make ends meet. She picked 200-300 pounds of cotton daily while suffering from polio. Fannie Lou Hamer was also one of the few literate workers on the plantation and obtained the timekeeper position. She recorded the hours worked by other sharecroppers and distributed wages. Her literacy prepared her for her later activism.
Sharecropping was an extension of slavery, which consisted of white landowners providing the land and seeds, tools, and sometimes housing. If the workers were required to buy their supplies from either the owner or town merchants, it was at an inflated price. Sharecroppers owed the landlord around half of their harvest. If it was poor, they might owe more than they earned. Most remained in economic dependency and poverty as they struggled to pay off their debts and improve their living conditions. Sharecropping declined, but it still existed until about 1960.