RARE Orig Photo Black African American Sharecropper Union Springs Alabama 1901

One of a kind - Unique. For offer, an interesting old photo! Fresh from a prominent estate in Upstate NY. Never offered on the market until now. Vintage, Old, Original, Antique, NOT a Reproduction - Guaranteed! Man and woman at cabin / shack - dog on porch as well. This came with other photos from a prominent family collection from Alabama. Must have moved to New York State. Measures 3 5/8 x 3 1/4 inches. Identified on back in manuscript writing.

If you collect 19th century Victorian era Americana history, American photography, occupational, culture, labor, etc. This is a treasure you will not see again! Add this to your image or paper / ephemera collection. Perhaps genealogy research importance too.

Union Springs is a city in and county seat of Bullock County, Alabama, United States. [2] The population was 3,980 at the 2010 census. The area that became Union Springs was first settled by white men after the Creek Indian removal of the 1830s. Twenty-seven springs watered the land, giving rise to the name of Union Springs.

The city was incorporated on January 13, 1844. Voters selected Union Springs as the county seat when Bullock County was formed in 1866. Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Some are governed by tradition, and others by law. The Italian mezzadria, the French métayage, the Catalan masoveria, the Castilian mediero, the Slavic polowcy and izdolshchina, and the Islamic system of muzara'a???????? , are examples of legal systems that have supported sharecropping. Sharecropping has benefits and costs for both the owners and the tenant. Under a sharecropping system, the landowner provided a share of land to be worked by the sharecropper, and usually provided other necessities such as housing, tools, seed, or working animals.

[1] Local merchants usually provided food and other supplies to the sharecropper on credit. The cropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant. [2] If there was any cash left over, the cropper kept it-but if his share came to less than what he owed, he remained in debt.

Farmers who farmed land belonging to others but owned their own mule and plow were called tenant farmers; they owed the landowner a smaller share of their crops, as the landowner did not have to provide them with as much in the way of supplies. In this system, the landowner encourages the cropper to remain on the land, solving the harvest rush problem.

[clarification needed] Since the cropper pays in shares or portions of his harvest, owners and croppers both share the risks and benefits of harvests being large or small and of prices being high or low. Because both parties benefit from larger harvests, tenants have an incentive to work harder and invest in better methods than, for example, in a slave plantation system.

However, by dividing the working force into many individual workers, large farms do not benefit from economies of scale. [citation needed] Though the arrangement protected sharecroppers from the negative effects of a bad crop, many sharecroppers (both white and black) remained quite poor.

About two-thirds of sharecroppers were white, the rest black. Sharecroppers, the poorest of the poor, organized for better conditions. The racially integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union made gains for sharecroppers in the 1930s.

Sharecropping had diminished in the 1940s due to the Great Depression, farm mechanization, and other factors. The commissary or company store for sharecroppers at Lake Providence as it appeared in the 19th century. Paige made a distinction between centralized sharecropping found on cotton plantations and the decentralized sharecropping with other crops.

The former is characterized by long lasting tenure. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. This form of tenure tends to be replaced by paid salaries as markets penetrate. Decentralized sharecropping involves virtually no role for the landlord: plots are scattered, peasants manage their own labor and the landowners do not manufacture the crops. This form of tenure becomes more common when markets penetrate.

Some economists have argued that sharecropping is not as exploitative as it is often perceived. John Heath and Hans P. Binswanger, contend that evidence from around the world suggests that sharecropping is often a way for differently endowed enterprises to pool resources to mutual benefit, overcoming credit restraints and helping to manage risk.

There are three different types of contracts. Workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum and keep the whole crop.

Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep some of the crop. It also gave sharecroppers a vested interest in the land, incentivizing hard work and care. American plantations were, however, wary of this interest, as they felt that would lead to African Americans demanding rights of partnership. Many black laborers denied the unilateral authority that landowners hoped to achieve, further complicating relations between landowners and sharecroppers.

Landlords opt for sharecropping to avoid the administrative costs and shirking that occurs on plantations and haciendas. It is preferred to cash tenancy because cash tenants take all the risks, and any harvest failure will hurt them and not the landlord. Therefore, they tend to demand lower rents than sharecroppers. Another possible benefit to sharecropping is that it enables women to have access to arable land, albeit not as owners, in places where ownership rights are vested only in men. The practice was harmful to tenants with many cases of high interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often keeping tenant farm families severely indebted.

The debt was often compounded year on year leaving the cropper vulnerable to intimidation and shortchanging. [10] Nevertheless, it appeared to be inevitable, with no serious alternative unless the croppers left agriculture. A new system of credit, the crop lien, became closely associated with sharecropping.

Under this system, a planter or merchant extended a line of credit to the sharecropper while taking the year's crop as collateral. The sharecropper could then draw food and supplies all year long. Sharecropping can have more than a passing similarity to serfdom or indenture, particularly where associated with large debts at a plantation store that effectively ties down the workers and their family to the land. It has therefore been seen as an issue of land reform in contexts such as the Mexican Revolution. Historically, sharecropping occurred extensively in Scotland, Ireland and colonial Africa.

Use of the sharecropper system has also been identified in England (as the practice of "farming to halves"). [14] It is still used in many rural poor areas of the world today, notably in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.

In settler colonies of colonial Africa, sharecropping was a feature of the agricultural life. White farmers, who owned most of the land, were frequently unable to work the whole of their farm for lack of capital. They, therefore, had African farmers to work the excess on a sharecropping basis.

In South Africa the 1913 Natives' Land Act[18] outlawed the ownership of land by Africans in areas designated for white ownership and effectively reduced the status of most sharecroppers to tenant farmers and then to farm laborers. In the 1960s, generous subsidies to white farmers meant that most farmers could afford to work their entire farms, and sharecropping faded out. The arrangement has reappeared in other African countries in modern times, including Ghana[19] and Zimbabwe. Nyambara argued that Eurocentric historiographical devices such as'feudalism' or'slavery' often qualified by weak prefixes like'semi-' or'quasi-' are not helpful in understanding the antecedents and functions of sharecropping in Africa. Sharecroppers on the roadside after eviction (1936).

Further information: Black land loss in the United States, African-American history of agriculture in the United States, and Jim Crow economy. Prior to the Civil War, sharecropping is known to have existed in Mississippi and is believed to have been in place in Tennessee. [21][22] However, it was not until the economic upheaval caused by the American Civil War and the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction that it became widespread in the South. [23][14] It is theorized that sharecropping in the United States originated in the Natchez District, roughly centered in Adams County, Mississippi with its county seat, Natchez. After the war, plantations and other lands throughout the South were seized by the federal government.

In January 1865, General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No.

15, which announced that he would temporarily grant newly freed families 40 acres of this seized land on the islands and coastal regions of Georgia. Many believed that this policy would be extended to all former slaves and their families as repayment for their treatment at the end of the war. An early 20th century Texas sharecropper's home diorama at the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum, in Greenville, Texas 2015. Southern landowners thus found themselves with a great deal of land, but no liquid assets to pay for labor. Many former slaves, now called freedmen, having no land or other assets of their own, needed to work to support their families. A sharecropping system centered on cotton, a major cash crop, developed as a result. Large plantations were subdivided into plots that could be worked by sharecroppers. Initially, sharecroppers in the American South were almost all black former slaves, but eventually cash-strapped indigent white farmers were integrated into the system. [2][25] During Reconstruction, the federal Freedmen's Bureau ordered the arrangements for freedmen and wrote and enforced their contracts. American sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently, usually growing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and other cash crops, and receiving half of the parcel's output. [27][28] Sharecroppers also often received their farming tools and all other goods from the landowner they were contracted with. [1] Landowners dictated decisions relating to the crop mix, and sharecroppers were often in agreements to sell their portion of the crop back to the landowner, thus being subjected to manipulated prices. [7] In addition to this, landowners, threatening to not renew the lease at the end of the growing season, were able to apply pressure to their tenants. [7] Sharecropping often proved economically problematic, as the landowners held significant economic control. Cotton sharecroppers, Hale County, Alabama, 1936. In the Reconstruction Era, sharecropping was one of few options for penniless freedmen to support themselves and their families. Other solutions included the crop-lien system (where the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant), a rent labor system (where the former slave rents his land but keeps his entire crop), and the wage system (worker earns a fixed wage, but keeps none of their crop). Sharecropping was by far the most economically efficient, as it provided incentives for workers to produce a bigger harvest. It was a stage beyond simple hired labor because the sharecropper had an annual contract. [26] Sharecropping as historically practiced in the American South is considered more economically productive than the gang system of slave plantations, though less efficient than modern agricultural techniques. Sharecropper's cabin displayed at Louisiana State Cotton Museum in Lake Providence, Louisiana (2013 photo). Sharecropping continued to be a significant institution in many states for decades following the Civil War. By the early 1930s, there were 5.5 million white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and mixed cropping/laborers in the United States; and 3 million blacks. [31][32] In Tennessee, sharecroppers operated approximately one-third of all farm units in the state in the 1930s, with white people making up two thirds or more of the sharecroppers. [22] In Mississippi, by 1900, 36% of all white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, while 85% of black farmers were. [21][dead link] In Georgia, fewer than 16,000 farms were operated by black owners in 1910, while, at the same time, African-Americans managed 106,738 farms as tenants. Around this time, sharecroppers began to form unions protesting against poor treatment, beginning in Tallapoosa County, Alabama in 1931, and Arkansas in 1934. Membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union included both blacks and poor whites, who used meetings, protests, and labor strikes to push for better treatment. The success of these actions frightened and enraged landlords, who responded with aggressive tactics. [34] Landless farmers who fought the sharecropping system were socially denounced, harassed by legal and illegal means, and physically attacked by officials, landlords' agents, or in extreme cases, angry mobs.

[35] Sharecroppers' strikes in Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, the 1939 Missouri Sharecroppers' Strike, were documented in the newsreel Oh Freedom After While. [36] The plight of a sharecropper was addressed in the song Sharecropper's Blues recorded by Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra in 1944. Sharecroppers' chapel at Cotton Museum in Lake Providence. The sharecropping system in the U. Increased during the Great Depression with the creation of tenant farmers following the failure of many small farms throughout the Dustbowl.

Traditional sharecropping declined after mechanization of farm work became economical beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s. [22][38] As a result, many sharecroppers were forced off the farms, and migrated to cities to work in factories, or became migrant workers in the Western United States during World War II. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message). Typically, a sharecropping agreement would specify the party that was expected to cover certain expenses, like seed, fertilizer, weed control, irrigation district assessments, and fuel. Sometimes the sharecropper covered those costs, but they expected a larger share of the crop in return. The agreement would also indicate whether the sharecropper would use his own equipment to raise the crops or use the landlord's equipment.

For example, a landowner may have a sharecropper farming an irrigated hayfield. The sharecropper uses his own equipment and covers all costs of fuel and fertilizer. The landowner pays the irrigation district assessments and does the irrigating himself.

The sharecropper cuts and bales the hay and delivers one third of the baled hay to the landlord's feedlot. The sharecropper might also leave the landlord's share of the baled hay in the field, where the landlord would fetch it when he wanted hay. Another arrangement could have the sharecropper delivering the landlord's share of the product to market, and the landlord would get his share in the form of the sale proceeds.

Market timing can entail storage costs and losses to spoilage for some crops as well. Economic theories of share tenancy. A sharecropper family in Walker County, Alabama c. The theory of share tenancy was long dominated by Alfred Marshall's famous footnote in Book VI, Chapter X.

14 of Principles[39] where he illustrated the inefficiency of agricultural share-contracting. Joseph Stiglitz (1974, [42] 1988), [43] suggested that if share tenancy is only a labor contract, then it is only pairwise-efficient and that land-to-the-tiller reform would improve social efficiency by removing the necessity for labor contracts in the first place. It has also been argued that the sharecropping institution can be explained by factors such as informational asymmetry (Hallagan, 1978;[48] Allen, 1982;[49] Muthoo, 1998), [50] moral hazard (Reid, 1976;[51] Eswaran and Kotwal, 1985;[52] Ghatak and Pandey, 2000), [53] intertemporal discounting (Roy and Serfes, 2001), [54] price fluctuations (Sen, 2011)[55] or limited liability (Shetty, 1988;[56] Basu, 1992;[57] Sengupta, 1997;[58] Ray and Singh, 2001). The role of African Americans in the agricultural history of the United States includes roles as the main work force when they were enslaved on cotton and tobacco plantations in the Antebellum South. They began the Great Migration to cities in the mid-20th century.

About 40,000 are farmers today. Plantation owners brought a mass of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean and Mexico to farm the fields during cotton harvests.

[1] Black women and children were also enslaved in the industry. [2] The growth of Slavery in the United States is closely tied to the expansion of plantation agriculture. The great majority of black farmworkers before 1865 were enslaved workers on Southern farms and plantations. Smaller numbers were free employees or farm owners.

In South Carolina there were about 400 free black farmers in the rural parishes surrounding Charleston. As farmers their strategies, production, and rural lives resembled the poor white neighbors.

Survival was a high priority and involved establishing economic self-sufficiency through concentration on food crops for their own families, and then by cultivating social advantages such as having a rich white patron. Virginia had a large free black element.

By 1860, there were 58,000 free Black people living in Virginia; 80 percent in rural areas. Most lived on the Eastern Shore. One out of eight Black people in the state was free and the rest were enslaved in 1860.

There were severe legal restrictions and terms of nonvoting, not testifying in court, not attending schools. Newly manumitted ex-slaves had to leave the state.

However the same property laws were applied, allowing free Black people to own and operated 1202 small farms in 1860. They were patronized by some wealthy white landowners, who would hire them for cash wages from time to time. They were especially needed at harvest time, and when it was necessary to replant the small tobacco plants. It was a political movement in 1853 to expel all free Black people from Virginia, but key White landowners intervened to block the proposal; they appreciated and often needed the labor of the free Black people. From the point of view of the free Black people, The small amounts of cash were useful; probably even more useful it was to be paid with old clothes, used tools, or young animals in lieu of cash wages.

Above all, it was essential to their survival to be useful and available to politically powerful white neighbors. Former slaves were encouraged to partaken wage labor arrangements, which often failed because the "wage system was not a part of the culture of work" within the South's systems of agriculture. Many Black agriculturists were subjugated to land tenure agreements and working as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and within the crop-lien system. [5] Southern black cotton farmers faced discrimination from the north. Many white Democrats were concerned about how many of African Americans were being employed in the US cotton industry and the dramatic growth of black landowners.

[6][7] They urged white farmers in the south to take control of the industry, which from time to time resulted in strikes by black cotton pickers; for instance Black people led by the Colored Farmer's Association (CFA) strikers from Memphis organized the Cotton pickers strike of 1891 in Lee County in September, which resulted in much violence. Black cotton farmers were very important to entrepreneurs which emerged during industrialization in the United States, particularly Henry Ford.

[8] The United States Emancipation Proclamation came into power on January 1, 1863, allowing a new journey for people of African ancestry to participate in the U. Agriculture Industry in a new way.

Sharecropping became widespread in the South during and after the Reconstruction Era. The conditions for black cotton farmers gradually improved during the twentieth century. Bunche, an expert in Negro suffrage in the United States, observed in 1940 that many thousands of black cotton farmers each year now go to the polls, stand in line with their white neighbors, and mark their ballots independently without protest or intimidation, in order to determine government policy toward cotton production control. [12] However, discrimination towards Black people continued as it did in the rest of society, and isolated incidents often broke out.

On 25 September 1961 Herbert Lee, a black cotton farmer and voter-registration organizer, was shot on the head by white State legislator E. [13][14] Yet the cotton industry continued to be very important for Black people in the southern United States, much more so than for whites. By the late 1920s around two-thirds of all African-American tenants and almost three-fourths of the croppers worked on cotton farms. [15] 3 out of every 4 black farm operators earned at least 40% of their income from cotton farming during this period.

[15] Studies conducted during the same period indicated that 2 in 3 black women from black landowning families were involved in cotton farming. [16] In 1920, 24% (218,612) of farms in the nation were Black-operated, less than 1% (2,026) were managed by Black people, and 76% (705,070) of Black farm operators were tenants. The cotton industry in the United States hit a crisis in the early 1920s.

Cotton and tobacco prices collapsed in 1920 following overproduction and the boll weevil pest wiped out the sea island cotton crop in 1921. Annual production slumped from 1,365,000 bales in the 1910s to 801,000 in the 1920s. [18] In South Carolina, Williamsburg County production fell from 37,000 bales in 1920 to 2,700 bales in 1922 and one farmer in McCormick County produced 65 bales in 1921 and just 6 in 1922. [18] As a result of the devastating harvest of 1922, some 50,000 black cotton workers left South Carolina, and by the 1930s the state population had declined some 15%, largely due to cotton stagnation. [18] However, it wasn't the collapse of prices or pests which resulted in the mass decline of African American employment in agriculture in the American south.

The mechanization of agriculture is undoubtedly the most important reason why many Black people moved to northern American cities in the 1940s and 1950s during the "Great Migration" as mechanization of agriculture was introduced, leaving many unemployed. [19] The Hopson Planting Company produced the first crop of cotton to be entirely planted, harvested and baled by machinery in 1944. Though funds were intended to be distributed by the end of 2012, the black farmers had yet to receive the designated remuneration by March 2013.

More than 60,000 farmers submitted late claim petitions in Pigford I. 33,000 Black farmers in Pigford II received decision letters dated August 30, 2013, resulting from the late claims process that closed on May 11, 2012. About 18,000 Pigford II claims were eventually decided in favor of the farmers and 15,000 claims were denied. As of 2012, there were 44,629 African-American farmers in the United States. The vast majority of African-American farmers were in southern states.

Stimulus relief packages, it is the first wave of relief for Black farmers since the extent of the debt-relief Pigford v. James Hopkinsons Plantation slaves planting sweet potatoes c. Picking cotton was often a subject which was mentioned in songs by African-American blues and jazz musicians in the 1920s-1940s, reflecting their grievances. In 1940, jazz pianist Duke Ellington composed "Cotton Tail" and blues musician Lead Belly wrote "Cotton Fields". In 1951, Big Mama Thornton wrote Cotton Picking Blues.

A number of blues and jazz musicians had worked on cotton plantations. Blues pianist Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins for instance had once been a tractor driver on a Mississippi plantation before enjoying a successful career with Muddy Waters. [19] Lord Buckley once sang a song titled "Black Cross", pertaining to an educated black farmer murdered by a mob comprising white men. Black Belt in the American South.

Black land loss in the United States. The term Jim Crow economy applies to a specific set of economic conditions in the United States during the period when the Jim Crow laws were in effect to force racial segregation; however, it should also be taken as an attempt to disentangle the economic ramifications from the politico-legal ramifications of "separate but equal" de jure segregation, to consider how the economic impacts might have persisted beyond the politico-legal ramifications. It includes the intentional effects of the laws themselves, effects that were not explicitly written into laws, and effects that continued after the laws had been repealed.

Some of these impacts continue into the present. The primary differences of the Jim Crow economy, compared to a situation like apartheid, revolve around the alleged equality of access, especially in regard to land ownership and entry into the competitive labor market; however, those two categories often relate to ancillary effects in all other aspects of life. Frequently sources will mention the Jim Crow economy, and then proceed to discuss only what is specific to the topic being broached by a particular author; however, unlike the laws passed to restrict access to services and education, the laws that governed the economy were often written in race-neutral terms, with inequality stemming from enforcement decisions. The economic impacts of Jim Crow are also intertwined with changes in the overall economy of the United States, from the Civil War through the 20th century. There is a temporal rhythm to the economic impacts of Jim Crow; from the Reconstruction onward, social trends preceded policy changes that, in turn, preceded economic changes.

Just in the last decade, "the Jim Crow economy" has been mentioned in the context of 19th century taxi drivers (Ortiz 2006), mid-20th century urban industrialization (Godwin 2000), post-World War II domestic service (Kusmer & Trotter 2009), and even in regard to Lumbee Indians in North Carolina (Lowery 2010). Clearly, it is a topic that covers a great deal of breadth; but, in dealing with only particular topics, there is always the risk of losing sight of the issue as a whole. Moreover, there is the risk of applying it to any economic topic in the Jim Crow era, making the phrase meaningless.

During the decade following the Civil War, the freed slaves made gains in political participation, land ownership, and personal wealth; but, those gains were somewhat temporary, perhaps because the mood of the federal policy-makers changed from punishing secessionists, to repatriating them. In the decades following the closure of the Freedmen's Bureau, in the South, black political participation was curtailed, the potential for acquiring new land was diminished, and ultimately Plessy v. Ferguson would usher in the Jim Crow era. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, not only was African American progress halted, it was regressing. Leading up to and following World War I, the agrarian economy of the South was in dire straits, beginning a slow shift to urbanization and limited industrialization; this period also saw the beginning of the Great Migration.

The 1930s saw increasing urbanization and industrialization in the South; and, federal policies of the time, such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, attempted to force economic parity between the South and the rest of the nation (Wright 1987:171). By the time of the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the scientific racism that had underlain much of the justification for the Jim Crow era legal racism had been discredited, the South had substantially closed its wealth gap with the rest of the nation, and America was both urbanized and industrialized. However, the African American struggle to earn economic parity, that had made progress during the first half century of the postbellum era, had largely been reversed during the second half. Legally, equality was assured, but that did little to actually promulgate equal conditions in daily life. Some of the gains in the South's economic relation to the rest of the U.

Can be explained by population shifts to other regions; so, it may have had as much to do with spreading poverty around, as spreading wealth around. In the period when agriculture had formed the basis of the economy, land and labor were intimately tied together in the ownership of farmland; in the shift to urban industrialization, neither land tenure, nor labor opportunities were necessarily improved for African Americans.

Thus, to understand the Jim Crow economy it is required to look to the social and political climate prior to the implementation of the laws, and to the economic inertia that continued to impact people's lives after the repeal of the laws. Further information: Black land loss in the United States and African-American history of agriculture in the United States. In the decades following the Civil War, there were steady increases in African American ownership of farmland in the South, from 3 million acres (12,000 km2) in 1875, to 8 million acres (32,000 km2) in 1890, 12 million acres (49,000 km2) at the turn of the century, and peaking at 12,800,000 acres (52,000 km2) in 1910 (Reynolds 2002:4). Other estimates suggest that total black ownership of land in the South may have been as much as 15 million acres (61,000 km2) within a half century after emancipation (Mitchell 2000:507).

There were also setbacks, due to property being taken illegally; in the first 30 years of the 20th century, 24,000 acres (97 km2) were taken, from 406 separate landowners Darity Jr. By 1930, the number of black owned farms was 3% lower than what it had been at the turn of the century (Woodman 1997:22).

The Southern Homestead Act opened up the transfer of public land in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, with the hope of providing land to freedmen by limiting the claims to 80 acres (320,000 m2) for the first 2 years (Pope 1970:203). The results were less purchasers than had been hoped for, largely because the recently freed slaves did not have the material means to settle unimproved property, and only 4,000 of the 11, 633 total claims were registered by freedmen (Pope 1970:205). Within the South, the Southern Homestead Act was seen as further punishment of attempting to secede; this was substantiated, by the repeal of 1876, when old enmities gave way to the promise of federal revenues (Gates 1940:311). By expanding the defined territory of the South to 16 states (including Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia), in 1910, there were 175,000 black farm owners compared to 1.15 million white farm owners (Higgs 1973:150).

Discounting the states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, the average white-owned farm was nearly twice the size of the average black-owned farm (Higgs 1973:162). Land ownership was an important source of capital for both groups, but the ability to use the land with maximal productivity was not equally afforded to both groups. From the antebellum period up to the mid-1880s, all land owners were highly dependent on credit from merchant transporters of cotton; however, as the transportation infrastructure improved the white land owners were able to use their greater land holdings to attract credit directly from Northern financiers, and were thus able to usurp the position of the merchant transporters that furnished necessary staple goods to cotton growers (Woodman 1977:547). Between 1900 and 1930, in the South, 4.7% of black farm owners became tenant farmers; while 9.5% of white farmers were reduced from owners to tenants during that period, that amounted to only 46.6% of all white farmers being tenants compared to 79.3% of all black farmers (Woodman 1997:9).

Moreover, there were fewer opportunities to acquire land, as white owners refused to sell land to black purchasers regardless of the price being offered, and there was little legal recourse when property was lost due to extra-legal practices (Higgs 1973:165). In any case, the availability of funds was greatly reduced by the failure of government-initiated lending institutions like the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company; and, lending organizations founded by benevolent societies often found themselves too overextended to withstand moderate levels of default on loans, such as the failure of the True Reformers Savings Banks in 1910 (Heen 2009:386). With new land being unobtainable, and existing land only able to be subdivided so far before becoming unusable as farmland, the progeny of the land owning generation were pressured to move to Southern cities, or outside the South completely (Bethel 1997:98;101).

Became involved with World War I, Northern cities became the focus of out-migration, and Northern industry became the employer of many former farmers Tolnay et al. The South was much slower to industrialize; and, where predominantly white land owners retained large tracts of farmland, and where the population of black laborers remained high, agriculture continued as the economic base (Roscigno & Tomaskovic-Devey 1996:576). African American movement into urban centers had begun just after the end of the Civil War; and, by 1870, the black population, in cities greater than 4,000, was increased by 80%, compared to only a 13% increase in the white population (Kellogg 1977:312). In contrast to the antebellum urban settlement pattern, cities that rose to prominence in the postbellum years tended to be more highly segregated (Groves & Muller 1975:174). The impact was greatest on those who migrated to cities early on; for those who migrated to the North, after 1965, there is evidence that they moved into neighborhoods that were the least segregated by race Tolnay et al. The initial pattern, starting in the 19th century, was to allow the original enclave neighborhoods to become overcrowded, while individual property owners subdivided acreages in low-lying areas at the urban periphery or close to industrial areas that employed unskilled laborers (Groves & Muller 1975:170). Starting with Baltimore in 1910, a number of cities throughout the South starting implementing racial zoning codes; although these were overturned by the Buchanan v.

Warley Supreme Court decision, in 1917, many large and small cities simply changed from overtly racial zoning to instituting zoning based on existing neighborhood composition (Silver 1997). In Alabama, "Birmingham continued illegally to enforce a racial zoning code until 1951" (Silver 1997:38). Many growing cities and towns enacted their own Jim Crow ordinances; and, as they grew, they planned low-cost housing in areas with less access to public services, often using transportation corridors and natural features as buffer zones (Lee 1992:376-377). This practice was not restricted to the South; for example, in 1940s Detroit, a 6 ft (1.8 m).

High concrete wall was erected to divide the Eight Mile-Wyoming area from neighboring white developments (Hayden 2003:111-112). These policies did not just impact the poor and undereducated; for example, around 1950, a cooperative housing development, that housed mainly faculty from Stanford University, limited availability to non-whites to 10%, in order to preserve financing for mortgages (Arrow 1998:92). The first consideration in the availability of labor is the overall distribution of the African American population. In 1870, 85.3% of all African Americans lived in the South, by 1910 that number dropped to 82.8%, by 1950 the number had dwindled to 61.5%, and by 1990 it was down to 46.2% living in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, or Virginia (Shelley & Webster 1998:168). In 1900, African Americans represented 34.3% of the South's overall population, in 1910 they still comprised 31.6% of the population; however, by 1950, they were only 22.5% of the total population, and that number dropped to 21% in 1960 (Nicholls 1964:35).

Within the South, the African American urban population went from 8.8% in 1870 to 19.7% in 1910, while the white urban population went from 7.7% to 19.5% in that same time period; however, in 1920, 25.4% of whites and 23.5% of blacks were in urban areas, a slight change in the pace of urbanization that only occurred in the South (Roback 1984:1190). For the United States, as a whole, the African American population went from 79% rural in 1910, to 85% urban in 1980 (Aiken 1985:383).

In the decade of World War I both groups were leaving the South, with whites leaving at a slightly higher rate; but in the decade of World War II, the South lost 1.58 million blacks, and only 866,000 whites (Wright 1987:174). In the decade from 1950 to 1960, the net out-migration was 1.2 million blacks, to only 234,000 whites; but, from 1960 to 1970 the picture changed dramatically, still losing 1.38 million blacks, but gaining 1.8 million whites. The raw numbers mask that the median education level of African Americans migrating out of the South was 6.6 years, up to 1960; whereas, by that same time, slightly more than a third of the white males in the South, with more than 5 years of college, had been born outside that region (Wright 1987:173). Thus, another factor that is masked by the raw numbers is that the areas African Americans were moving into were already experiencing black unemployment rates of up to 40%, and where there were few employers that utilized unskilled and undereducated labor, at all (Wright 1987:175). Convicts Leased to Harvest Timber, around 1915, Florida.

During the civil rights era, "economic coercion" was used to prevent participation, by denying credit, causing evictions, and canceling In 1973, only 2.25% of 5 million U. In the most extreme analysis, the level of urban residential segregation, along the unidirectional economic dependency of African American communities, presents the possibility that they may be treated as a "national collectivity of internal colonies" (Bailey 1973:61). From this perspective, small black-owned businesses are seen as the "ghetto domestic sector, " white-owned businesses that operate within the internal colonies are seen as the "ghetto enclave sector, " and the black laborers that work outside the community are seen as the "ghetto labor-export sector" (Bailey 1973:62). The idea of a black internal colony makes it especially notable that the Jim Crow era was brought to a close not only by the internal influences of the civil rights movement, but also from external pressures brought by international trading partners and decolonized developing nations (Cable & Mix 2003:198). The second consideration is how laws governing contract enforcement, enticement, emigrant agents, vagrancy, convict leasing, and debt peonage function to immobilize labor and restrict competition in a system where agriculture was the dominant consumer of labor.

The South was overwhelmingly based on agricultural production through the postbellum years, only seeing substantial increases in industrial manufacturing starting in the 1930s; and, for those who did not own farmland, the dominant forms of employment were: farm laborer, sharecropper, share-renter, and fixed renter. Using a set wage for laborers without contracts presented the problem of either overpaying during periods when labor demands were low, or risking the loss of the laborer during the peak of harvest season (Roback 1984:1172). Whether white or black, the wage earned by the tenant farmer was relatively equal (Higgs 1973:151). Moreover, the tenant and the planter class landowner shared in the inherent risks of uncertain crop production; thus, external capital was invested in the merchant transporter who furnished staple goods in return, rather than in the agriculturalists directly (Parker 1980:1035).

By the last decade of the 19th century, the planter class had recovered from the Civil War enough to both keep Northern industrialist manufacturing interests out of the South, and to take the role of merchant themselves (Woodman 1977:546). As the planter class came back to prominence, the rural and urban middle class lost power, and the poor rural tenant farmers were set in opposition based both on race, and the inherent superiority of the wealthy landowner (Nicholls 1964:25). It was in this social climate that the Jim Crow laws began to appear, amidst the Populist challenges of the tenant farmers of both races; thus, the laws may be seen as a tactic to drive a wedge between the members of the lowest social class, by using obvious physical traits to define the opposing sides (Roscigno & Tomaskovic-Devey 1996:568). Outside of laws that specifically addressed the issue of race, other laws that impacted the tenant farmer were often differentially enforced, to the detriment of African Americans. Contract enforcement laws were contingent on demonstration of an intent to defraud the contractor, but often failure to live up to the terms of the contract were treated as intentional; these laws were addressed in the Supreme Court decision of Bailey v.

Vagrancy laws functioned to keep workers from exiting the labor force entirely, and were often used to forcibly ensure that every able body was engaged in some form of work; in some cases, African Americans were made into misdemeanants, through vagrancy laws, just on the basis of traveling outside the territory where they were personally known (Roback 1984:1168). In any case, African Americans were often disadvantaged in obtaining work contracts outside the areas where they were personally known, due to employers not wanting to pay the cost of having to check on their claims of specific knowledge or skills germane to a task (Ransom & Sutch 1973:139). The third consideration is how the overall transition from an agriculture-based economy to an urban, industrial economy. In the South, industrial growth started with labor-intensive, unskilled industries; for example, manufacturing employment increased from 14.5% in 1930 to 21.3% in 1960, but the increase was largest for non-durable goods (Nicholls 1964:26-27).

For black males, in the South, agricultural employment dropped from 43.6% in 1940, to 4.9% in 1980; in that same time period, manufacturing employment rose from 14.2%, to 26.9% (Heckman & Payner 1989:148). For black females, throughout the South, manufacturing employment rose from 3.5% in 1940, to 17.2% in 1980; for that same time period, personal service employment decreased from 65.8%, to 13.7% (Heckman & Payner 1989:1989).

One study, looking at non-agricultural employment from 1920 to 1930, determined that black males were losing jobs not to industrial mechanization, but to white males (Anderson & Halcoussis 1996:12). From 1896, scientific racism was used as the basis for declaring black clients as substandard risks, which also affected the ability of black-owned. Another economic impact of death is seen when the deceased does not have a will, and land is bequeathed to multiple people, under intestacy law, as tenancies in common (Mitchell 2000:507-508). Frequently, the recipients of such property do not realize that if one of the common owners wishes to sell their share, then the entire estate can be put up for partition sale. Most state statutes suggest that partition in kind be preferred over partition sale, except where properties cannot be divided equitably for the parties involved; however, many courts opt to require properties be put up for partition sale because the monetary value of the land is higher as a single parcel than a number of subdivided parcels, and also, to some extent, because the utility value of rural land is higher if it can be used a single productive unit (Mitchell 2000:514-515;563).

African American estate planning is thought to be minimal in rural, economically depressed areas, and developers are known to target properties in those areas (Mitchell 2000:517). Further information: Racial inequality in the United States. An economic analysis, conducted at the end of the 1970s, concluded that even if the freed slaves had been given the 40 acres and a mule that had been promised by the Freedman's Bureau, it still would not have been enough to entirely close the wealth gap between whites and blacks, to that point in time (DeCanio 1979:202-203).

The research that underlies public program policy decisions continues to be guided by sensationalistic "failure studies" that focus on communities as liabilities, rather than identifying positive community aspects that programs could build upon as assets (Woodson 1989:1028;1039). Counting owners and tenants, there were 925,708 black farmers in 1920; in 2000, there were about 18,000 black farmers, which is roughly 11,000 less than the number of black farm owners in 1870 (Mitchell 2000:527-528). As the recent decision of Pigford v. Glickman has shown, there are still race-based biases in way government entities like the United States Department of Agriculture decide how to disburse farm credit. By federal regulation, the local commissions that make the decisions must be elected from current farm owners; in two cases unrelated to the Pigford decision, five different county commissioners were found to have wrongly denied disaster assistance to African American farmers (Mitchell 2000:528-529).

Further information: Racial segregation in the United States. African American residential centralization, which started in the postbellum and Great Migration periods, continues to have a negative impact on employment rates Herrington et al. In fact, "one third of African Americans live in areas so intensely segregated that they are almost completely isolated from other groups in society" (Mitchell 2000:535).

The unemployment effects of residential centralization are twice as problematic in metropolitan areas with total populations over 1 million (Weinberg 2000:116). A one standard deviation reduction in residential centralization could reduce unemployment by about a fifth; and, a complete elimination of residential centralization could reduce unemployment by almost half for high school educated males, and nearly two-thirds for college educated males and females (Weinberg 2000:126). This item is in the category "Collectibles\Photographic Images\Photographs". The seller is "dalebooks" and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped worldwide.

Production Technique: Gelatin-Silver Print
Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
Style: Documentary
Theme: Americana, Cultures & Ethnicities
Type: Photograph
Subject: Historic & Vintage
Original/Reprint: Original Print
Listed By: Dealer or Reseller
Original/Licensed Reprint: Original
Year of Production: 1901
Time Period Manufactured: 1900-1924
Date of Creation: 1900-1909
Color: Sepia
Size Type/Largest Dimension: Medium (Up to 10\
Region of Origin: US