African American Share Crop Cotton Platation Workers Portrait Real Photo Postcard

The scene of African American families, including children, engaged in cotton picking alongside a white man in the American South dates to the late 19th or early 20th century. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, cotton remained a dominant cash crop, heavily reliant on manual labor largely supplied by former enslaved people and their descendants.

This era saw the rise of sharecropping and tenant farming, economic systems that often trapped Black families in cycles of debt and perpetuated their economic subjugation under white landowners, even after emancipation. The labor-intensive nature of cotton cultivation meant entire families, including young children, were integral to the harvest, reflecting the ongoing struggle for economic autonomy and social justice in the post-Reconstruction South.