AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE Overview of events in the USA that had a deep impact on African-American society
After the Civil War, when slavery was officially abolished and the
sharecropping system established, there was also little hope for sharecroppers of
achieving either economic or personal independence from whites. Plantations continued into
the 1950s with sharecroppers working the land. Eventually, however, the work force left,
giving way to new labor-saving machinery. Today, the most recognizable remnants of this
once dominant economic and social system are a large collection of plantation buildings.
The white landowners, through mortgaging their property or through credit connections, scraped together enough cash to provide seed, implements, provisions, and basic accommodations for the blacks, who were willing to stay on and work. In return, the blacks planted and harvested the crops, under the supervision of a few salaried white overseers on the larger plantations and under the watchful eye of the owner himself if the farm was smaller. It was up to the plantation owners to sell each year’s cotton harvest and calculate each black family’s fair share of the proceeds. They deducted the market value of the food, clothing, and other necessities that had been provided to that family, and gave them the difference in cash. In theory, the system was fair enough, but in practice it was heavily weighted against the blacks. The sharecropping system was shaped by mutual dependency in the years immediately following the Civil War, but it rapidly developed into a kind of modern-day feudalism. As a matter of fact, for African Americans there was always a desire for personal freedom, which is very well expressed in the following quotation of James L. Bradley: From the time I was fourteen years old, I used to think a great deal about freedom. It was my heart’ desire; I could not keep it out of my mind. Many a sleepless night I have spent in tears, because I was a slave. My heart ached to feel within me the life of liberty. However, slavery is only one part of the story of African-Americans in the Delta. The Delta tells a story of the survival of the working poor, of labor patterns, their family life, religion, spiritual expression, and the "spirit of the cultures", such as humor, hospitality, storytelling, and gentility. African Americans had in fact a crucial influence on the cultural heritage in the Delta region. There is a diversity of contributions African Americans made to the region’s, as well as to the national heritage, for instance in art, literature, science, technology, architecture. Their labor built much of the plantation architecture visitors see today, and they had an equal impact on patterns of speech and music. |
African Americans were very much involved in the production of
cotton. Until the 18th century, slave labor was vital to the Southern economy. Before the
Civil War, there was a hierarchic social structure, of which slaves were at the bottom and
plantation owners at the top. To be precise, the white minority exploited the black
majority, who had to endure constant humiliation. For whites, blacks had to be regarded as
inferior in order to justify slavery. In order to make it easier for them to justify
deliberately underpaying them they kept regarding blacks as less ambitious and more
readily satisfied with a humble status in life. While whites enjoyed the benefits, blacks
had to cope with severe disadvantages, no political or legal entitlements, nor economic
rights. As far as the education of African Americans is concerned, there was also an
enormous imbalance in facilities, teacher salaries, length of school terms and operating
budgets, which made it difficult to maintain adequate schools. This aspect of education
had increased the awareness of the doors
that remained closed to African Americans. The
reason for this imbalance was the whites’ fear that blacks could climb up the social
ladder.