Some of the books I read deserve new attention and consideration. Stribling or Cotton by Jack Bethea, but they deserve attention because they illuminate a way of life that affected millions of people. Many of the works that I discuss are mostly forgotten, such as The Store by T. This book discusses more than a hundred primary sources published over the course of a century. Once I began looking for literary works about sharecropping, I found them everywhere. What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? This book analyzes the literature of sharecropping to describe how sharecroppers lived, identify the social forces that ensnared them in sharecropping, and explain the enduring significance of sharecropping for the United States. In the early twentieth- century, most farmers in the South did not own the land they worked, and in 1930, there were more than five million white sharecropping families and three million Black sharecropping families. While sharecropping initially developed as a labor arrangement for former slaves, it quickly developed into a multiracial system of labor that affected whites, Blacks, Latinos, and every other ethnic group in the region. Readers may be surprised to learn how pervasive sharecropping was in the South. What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? Sharecropping lasted for nearly a century as the dominant paradigm for agricultural labor in the South, and it affected every aspect of the region’s culture, but few people know about the prevalence of sharecropping or the lives of sharecroppers. I wanted to write about sharecropping, the socioeconomic system that emerged in the South after the Civil War that bridged slavery and freedom by using debt and coercion to tie laborers to crops for a harvest cycle. Most Americans learn the story of emancipation, but few people learn what happened after slavery ended. Davis, author of DRIVEN TO THE FIELD: Sharecropping and Southern Literature. Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with David A.

'Sippi by John Oliver Killens