The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, studying the sharecropping system back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money. “The Negro farm hand,” a colored minister wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, “gets for his compensation hardly more than the mule he plows, that is, his board and shelter. Some mules fare better than Negroes.”
