sharecropper

When growing up in the 1910s, blues singer-guitarist Robert Johnson moved from Mississippi to Memphis, Tenn., and then Arkansas, before settling in the Mississippi Delta when his mother married a sharecropper.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 23, 2026

“My grandmother was a sharecropper in Arkansas, and I know that this is the same thing,” a man shouts at one point as whistles shrill and a handheld siren wails.

From Slate ● Feb. 11, 2026

Miles Caton, actor: The first time I got the script, they prompted it as a 19-year-old sharecropper who’s a musician, and he would have been Sam Cooke if it was 20 years later.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 17, 2025

Hamer, a former sharecropper and a leader of the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, objected to the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

From Salon ● Aug. 24, 2024

We sat on the porch in a semicircle in camp chairs, me between the sharecropper and the millionaire.

From "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

A soft-spoken young man, Jesse Owens was the son of black Alabama sharecroppers.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026

"I come from a proud line of sharecroppers and cowboys. My grandfather was buried in his cowboy boots," she shares.

From BBC ● Mar. 1, 2024

Lewis was born in 1940 as one of 10 children of Alabama sharecroppers and rose to become an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a lion of the U.S.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 26, 2024

His parents, Lemius and Eunice Sonnier, were sharecroppers, and young Joel and his older brother, P.J., picked cotton alongside them from an early age.

From New York Times ● Jan. 26, 2024

On the night of September 30, 1919, some one hundred African American sharecroppers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a black church three miles north of Elaine, Arkansas.

From "1919 The Year That Changed America" by Martin W. Sandler