A mirror to African American history, agriculture reflects the long struggle for racial and economic equality.

For two and one-half centuries, most African and Afro-American slaves worked in fields. Among them were rice and tobacco cultivators; fishers, hunters, trappers, and animal herders; and forest cutters and other forestry workers. They produced staple crops (tobacco, rice, indigo, wheat, corn, peanuts) and forged families. Some were permitted to have garden plots and barter their produce, thus earning money to purchase freedom and property. Gradual abolition in the post-Revolutionary North saw many ex-slaves buying farms and creating livelihoods, even as “King Cotton” rose in the South. Most free blacks also lived in plantation areas. Treated as “slaves without masters,” they survived as farmhands and tenants. Sometimes they acquired land and livestock; a small propertied elite held servants and slaves. Slavery, class privilege, and white racism developed side by side.

In the wake of the Civil War and emancipation, ex-slaves equated freedom with self and land ownership and literacy. Thousands earned wages as Union laborers; their children attended missionary-run schools; and freed communities evolved. Tens of thousands of freedpeople farmed family plots at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, Port Royal, South Carolina, and other government farms. But these opportunities ended when Congress authorized the Freedmen's Bureau (1865) and restored abandoned lands to ex-Rebel owners. Freedpeople still hoped for “40 acres and a mule,” or leases on homesteads elsewhere. But most signed Bureau-supervised contracts with cash-strapped landlords, usually as sharecroppers. A sharecropper contributed his labor and half the fertilizer to earn half of the crop. Landlords exacted high interest and often cheated. Sharecroppers who resisted landlords’ rules risked expulsion, whipping, and sometimes death.

Sharecropping mirrored the crop-lien system, which kept farmers and tenants in a vicious cycle of debt. With consignment goods from northern mercantile firms, merchants “furnished” food and supplies; buyers used cash or their crops for credit. Every item in the store had two prices, one for cash and another, higher price for “time” customers who paid interest rates from 25 to 50 percent. Once he agreed to his first crop lien, a farmer of tenant rarely could “pay out.”