Principles of Compensation
(Malik Speaking)

 
 
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And let me add that if you think that the exploitation of blacks as a cheap source of labor ended with slavery, you're wrong. In many parts of the south the sharecropping system eventually replaced slavery as a way to produce cotton. Blacks worked as sharecroppers well into the 1940s when they were pushed out by mechanization or left the south to get jobs in northern cities.

Sharecropping kept the croppers constantly in debt and dependent on the whites who owned the land. Whatever profits were made went to the whites, but the hardest and least rewarding work went to the blacks.

Reference: For an account of sharecroppers moving north, see The Promised Land by Nicholas Lemann. Studies of croppers done in the 1930s include Charles Johnson The Shadow of the Plantation and Arthur Raper Preface to Peasantry.

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