HISTORY
How Sharecropping Robbed Black Americans of Generational Wealth
Abolition granted freedom but not access to opportunities
Giving a group of people freedom without opportunity is cruel, like donating frozen turkeys to the homeless, knowing they do not have access to a pan or stove to bake it in. And yet, this is precisely how Black Americans were treated after the Civil War. While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the federal government took no steps toward closing the racial wealth gap created by this unjust system. As a result, much of the black community continued to struggle economically, locked out of generational wealth. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. touched on this in his 1963 speech at the March on Washington. "The negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."
When Congress passed the 13 Amendment abolishing slavery, former plantation owners stood to lose everything. An agricultural-based economic system built using free labor could not be sustained by paying Black people fair wages. So, they designed a system that gave them the power to continue exploiting Black people's labor. And it didn't take them long to find the goose that laid the golden egg — sharecropping. Under this system, planters, many of whom were former plantation owners…
