Though both groups were at the bottom of the social ladder, sharecroppers began to organize for better working rights, and the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union began to gain power in the 1930s. The Great Depression, mechanization, and other factors lead sharecropping to fade away in the 1940s.

When did sharecropping start date?

By the early 1870s, the system known as sharecropping had come to dominate agriculture across the cotton-planting South. Under this system, Black families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves; in return, they would give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the year.

What was sharecropping and why did it evolve after the Civil War?

Sharecropping evolved following the failure of both the contract labor system and land reform after the Civil War (1861-65). ... Following the Civil War, plantation owners, without enslaved laborers or the money to pay a free labor force, were often unable to farm their land.