#1 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.
#2 High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and dishonest landowners and merchants often kept sharecropping families severely in debt, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or even illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops
#3 The former slave owners invented sharecropping as the next best thing to slavery (from their point of view) and imposed it as soon as the Federal government ceased trying to protect the former slaves. Sharecropping was brought to us by the same folks who brought us slavery as the nearest thing to a continuation of slavery they could get away with.
