'Him Doing Well Was Through His Children': Sharecropper's Son Makes Dad Proud
When Percy White's father left the Virginia farm he worked to move north, the land owner said he wouldn't make it, and would come back. He didn't. That is, until he returned to say "I told you so."
Born the son of sharecroppers in rural Virginia, Percy White III grew up in poverty.
During the early 1960s, White lived on a tobacco farm in Dinwiddie County with his grandparents, parents and his two sisters, in a house without electricity and running water.
There, White's family experienced the impacts of sharecropping, a system that was stacked against black people like them. Robert Marek, who people called Mr. Marks, owned the farm,
