Sharecroppers Quotes & Sayings

Sharecropping is the dirty little secret at the root of America's wealth - along with slavery itself. The immense profits generated by the industrious yet impoverished Black "sharecroppers" and "tenant farmers" financed Europe's and America's Industrial Revolution, including the building of their railroads, factories, mills, and their entire infrastructure. It is truthfully asserted that the major cities of America and the Western world were "built with bricks of cotton." Today the debt traps designed to ensnare the working poor and middle class in a lifelong cycle of debt - the high-cost installment loans that charge usurious interest rates of 100% or more, the "payday" loans that charge 400% interest, the extortionate credit card multi-charges, the subprime mortgages with ballooning interest rates, and the home equity loan swindles - are the bastard children of the sharecropping American South. It — Reclamation Project

Every great thing starts with an idea, followed by a doubt and finally a resolve to abandon or pursue. Victory is a treacherous journey. — Dane Cook

It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What are Americans? We've got everything from sharecroppers to atomic physicist here, and there's certainly no uniformity in their thought processes. There's very little they have in common. In fact, Americans should we say, have less in common than any other nationality. — William S. Burroughs

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess.

The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago. — Anthony Doerr

We shall see our friends again. We can lay them in the grave; we know they are safe with God. — Matthew Simpson

In August 1917, white, Black, and Muskogee tenant farmers and sharecroppers in several eastern and southern Oklahoma counties took up arms to stop conscription, with a larger stated goal of overthrowing the US government to establish a socialist commonwealth. These more radically minded grassroots socialists had organized their own Working Class Union (WCU), with Anglo-American, African American, and Indigenous Muskogee farmers forming a kind of rainbow alliance. Their plan was to march to Washington, DC, motivating millions of working people to arm themselves and to join them along the way. After a day of dynamiting oil pipelines and bridges in southeastern Oklahoma, the men and their families created a liberated zone where they ate, sang hymns, and rested. By the following day, heavily armed posses supported by police and militias stopped the revolt, which became known as the Green Corn Rebellion. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state, the majesty of the people, call it what you will - a doge, an avoyer, an archon, a president, a consul, a syndic; this becomes at once an object of ambition and dispute, and, in time, of division, faction, sedition, and rebellion. — John Adams

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something. — Buck Owens

My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers. — John Lewis

Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. — J.D. Vance

Using the Africanist model, each generation should take the family name to a higher place. My father's folks were sharecroppers in South Carolina. He went to Harlem. They were still poor, but they moved up. If my parents didn't do this and offer me this background, I wouldn't be here. — Ving Rhames

The color palette grew as the story progressed. The 1920's sharecroppers were muted and neutrals, the 30's and 40's introduced burgundy to the neutral palette. The 1950's introduced green, black and denim blue, the 1960's introduced orange and heavier more saturated color, the 1970's introduced more primaries, and the fashion palette became more recognizable as a contemporary one from there. — Ruth E. Carter

I don't remember any impression [from blues].The blues was just everywhere in the Mississippi Delta. It was mostly black sharecroppers living there, and there was a lot of blues around. Sometimes the guys would sing the blues in the fields, working. — Mose Allison

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote. — Alice Walker

I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country. — Carrie Mae Weems

People often say that, by pointing out to a man the faults of his mistress, you succeed only in strengthening his atachment to her, because he does not believe you. — Marcel Proust

He wouldn't have understood if I'd told him why I spend my time with criminals.
He didn't know that I belonged with them. More than I belonged with him. — Samantha Shannon