With no land of their own after the promise of forty acres was withdrawn, many freed families agreed to farm plantation land for a share of the harvest, often half. Landowners or local merchants advanced seed, tools and food on credit against the coming crop, under what was called the crop lien system. At settlement time, many sharecroppers were told they still owed money, which bound them to the same land year after year.
White tenant farmers also sharecropped, but Black sharecroppers faced violence when they organized or questioned their accounts. In 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas, white mobs killed many Black people after sharecroppers met to form a union. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded in 1934, organized Black and white tenants together.
Sharecropping declined after New Deal farm programs and the mechanical cotton picker pushed tenants off the land, feeding the Great Migration. It left a legacy of Black land loss and rural poverty that persists in parts of the South.