Sharecroppers were vulnerable to all manner of exploitation. Powdermaker estimates that twenty-five or thirty percent of them may have gotten an honest settlement at the end of the year. Since sharecroppers and tenants were largely illiterate, without recourse to the law, and often unable even to move to a different plantation without the permission of their landlord, less scrupulous landowners were free to do as they chose. Indeed, it was for just this reason that Black tenants were preferred to white ones. Blacks could be more easily squeezed; poor whites were thought to be too
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