Sharecropping was not at all an ideal way for freed slaves to make money, but it would have to do for the time being. Just having found independence, many blacks still faced much racism and prejudice from everyone who had once looked down upon them. They struggled to find jobs, homes, and safety from hate groups and abuse. Sharecropping was the best that most could manage. It was just a small step up from slavery, and sharecropping entailed a lot more giving to the land owners that receiving to provide for the family. The way sharecropping worked was that people, mostly ex. slaves, would rent land from the rich white landowners, and in exchange, they would pay for the land with up to half of their earnings or crop harvest, while not getting paid much at all. Sharecropping was mainly a trap, as the landowners would always pretend that the black farmers had not made enough crop for the year, so they would always have the farmers in a deficit. This made it impossible to get away from the lifestyle. Sharecropping happened as a result of the end of slavery, and it led to an all new kind of enslavement of the black people.
Tenant farming was a step up from sharecropping in the south. A tenant farmer usually owned his own animals and equipment, rather than borrowing from the land owner, but the trap in this situation was that the landowner owned the very house that the farmer and his family slept in and at the end of each growing season the farmer forked over much of what money he had earned and what crop he had grown in order to continue renting the land and home. Tenant farming was created as a way for those who owned tools and animals to have more opportunities, but it also led to the unfair treatment of the black people in the south. The typical amount of crop given in tenant farming was about 1/4-1/3 of the total production.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/brown/sharecropping.htm
www.english.illinois.edu
3chicspolitico.com
http://stfm.astate.edu/tenant.html
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