Video Reax

A Portrait of A Sharecropper’s Family

I just finished watching a bunch of videos on African American history for my class and honestly some of this stuff really shocked me. I knew slavery ended after the Civil War but I didn't realize how the system basically continued under a different name.

The whole sharecropping thing was basically a trap. After 1865, freed Black Americans and poor whites would farm plots of land owned by someone else. The landowner provided everything like seeds and tools, and the farmer did all the work. At harvest time, the landowner took 50% or more of the crops. But here's the really messed up part: sharecroppers had to buy supplies on credit with interest rates going up to 70%. They literally could never make enough money to break even, so families stayed trapped in debt for generations. The videos called it "slavery by another name" and I totally see why now.

There was this brief period called Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 where things looked promising. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed, and over 2,000 Black officials got elected to government positions. But after 1877 everything fell apart with Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and violence that basically eliminated Black voting in the South by 1900.

Great Migration Chicago 1920s

This led to the Great Migration where 6 million African Americans moved north and west between 1916 and 1970. They were escaping sharecropping poverty and racial violence, looking for factory jobs that opened up during WWI and WWII. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York saw huge population increases. This migration created amazing cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance and gave African Americans more political power, even though they still faced housing descrimination and race riots.

Learning about leaders like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois was interesting too because they had completely different approaches to advancement.

Disclaimer: I used ai to summarize my notes and help me create a blog post.