Sharecropping

Sharecropping was a defining feature of life in the Black Belt of Alabama for generations after the Civil War: African Americans worked land controlled by white owners and depended on those owners for survival. The book traces the system through Walter McMillian’s childhood in the cotton fields and the region’s later shift toward timber, showing how the end of an old agricultural economy did not end the poverty and racial hierarchy built around it.

Historical Formation and Racial Order

In the nineteenth century, plantation owners developed Monroe County, Alabama, for cotton production. Its fertile soil drew white settlers from the Carolinas, who established successful plantations and a large enslaved population. After the Civil War, African Americans continued to work the fields of the Black Belt of Alabama as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, dependent on white landowners for their livelihoods. The arrangement belonged to a wider racial order that survived the collapse of Reconstruction and persisted through Jim Crow.

The Great Migration carried thousands of African Americans away from the region in the 1940s, mostly toward jobs in the Midwest and on the West Coast. Those who remained continued to work the land even as the agricultural economy that sustained sharecropping weakened. The book’s account of this history places rural labor within a longer struggle over land, work, and racial power rather than treating it as an isolated economic practice.

Walter McMillian’s Childhood in the Fields

Walter grew up in a poor Black settlement outside Monroeville, Alabama, and worked alongside his family before he was old enough to attend school. Children of sharecroppers in southern Alabama were expected to learn plowing, planting, and picking as soon as they could contribute. His mother managed to send him to a dilapidated school for Black children for a couple of years, but by the time he was eight or nine, his labor picking cotton was considered more valuable to the family than the uncertain advantages of continuing his education. At eleven, he could operate a plow as well as his older siblings.

His early life makes visible how agricultural labor could narrow a child’s choices long before adulthood. Schooling was limited not only by the poor opportunities available to Black children in the 1950s, but also by the immediate demands of work in the fields. Walter’s later knowledge of the region’s changing economy began in a childhood shaped by that pressure.

The Cotton Economy Gives Way

By the 1950s, small cotton farms were becoming less profitable even with the low wages paid to Black sharecroppers and tenants. The State of Alabama helped white landowners shift toward timber and forest products by offering substantial tax incentives for pulp and paper mills. Thirteen of the state’s sixteen mills opened during this period, while more land across the Black Belt of Alabama was converted to pine cultivation.

African Americans were largely excluded from the emerging industry. As sharecropping and Jim Crow receded, many Black residents faced persistent unemployment and deepening poverty instead of secure access to the new jobs. The counties of the region remained among the poorest in the United States. The transition altered the landscape and the principal industry, but left the distribution of opportunity sharply unequal.

Walter’s Business and the Limits of Independence

Walter recognized the timber industry’s growth and started a pulpwood business that developed along with it in the 1970s. He borrowed money to buy a power saw, a tractor, and a pulpwood truck. By the 1980s, the business provided a modest income and a degree of independence. It offered an alternative to the unskilled jobs many poor Black residents took at mills or factories, where employment meant working for white business owners amid the racial strain of Alabama in the 1970s and 1980s.

That independence did not free Walter from racism, but it gave him more latitude than many African Americans in the region possessed. It also drew respect and admiration, alongside contempt and suspicion from some white residents who doubted that a Black man with limited formal education could legitimately achieve such independence. His experience marks both a break from the dependence associated with sharecropping and the persistence of the social assumptions that had helped sustain it.