Sharecropping, Debt, and the Tenant System

The formal end of slavery did not end the labor system that had built the Black Belt. It transformed it, into something that kept most of the same people in roughly the same fields, working for roughly the same landowners, under a new set of legal arrangements designed to produce the same result. Sharecropping and tenant farming spread across Alabama in the years after eighteen sixty-five in a pattern that was not accidental.

Freedpeople wanted land, forty acres, in the famous formulation, some basis of economic independence. What they got, instead, was a contract. The planter supplied the land, sometimes the seed and tools, and took a share of the crop at harvest.

The laborer supplied the work and received whatever remained. In practice, the accounts were kept by the planter, and the books almost never came out in the laborer's favor. Debt peonage, a system in which workers could not leave because they were perpetually behind on their account, was the result.

It was enforced by vagrancy laws that allowed sheriffs to arrest any Black person who could not prove they were employed, and then hire out the arrested person's labor to planters or industrial operators. This was convict leasing under another name, and it ran in parallel with the formal convict leasing system that Birmingham's coal mines used well into the twentieth century. The Tuskegee Institute, founded in eighteen eighty-one by Booker T.

Washington forty miles east of Montgomery, trained thousands of Black Alabamians in agricultural science and trade skills in part as a response to this trap. Washington believed, controversially among his contemporaries, that economic self-sufficiency was the path forward. George Washington Carver, who joined the Tuskegee faculty in eighteen ninety-six, spent decades trying to break the Black Belt's dependence on cotton by developing hundreds of uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other crops that could restore depleted soil and diversify income.

His work was real science, though the popular mythology around it has sometimes outrun the documentary record. The boll weevil arrived in Alabama from Mexico around nineteen ten and moved through the state's cotton fields destroying the crop that the entire economy of the Black Belt had been built on. In Coffee County, in the southern part of the state, a boll weevil monument was erected in nineteen nineteen, the only monument to an agricultural pest in the United States, because local farmers were forced to diversify into peanuts and actually did better.

For the Black Belt, there was no such silver lining. The cotton collapse accelerated the Great Migration, as hundreds of thousands of Black Alabamians left for Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland in search of wages and basic civil rights the state refused to provide.