Sharecrop Companion Guide

By Claudia Stack and Kathryn Wall

The SHARECROP Companion Guide provides historical context and lesson plans about sharecropping in the United States. This book can be used alone or in conjunction with the SHARECROP documentary (Stack Stories LLC 2017). SHARECROP features oral history of ten individuals who were involved in sharecropping during the segregation era. Sometimes called the "forgotten farmers," sharecroppers were vital to American agricultural production prior to mechanized agriculture. The film and companion guide explore what life was like for cotton sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, as well as tobacco sharecroppers in the Carolinas. Support for the SHARECROP film and companion guide was provided by the Middle Road Foundation. The guide's introductory essay provides historical context for the stories, and each chapter focuses on one individual. Common Core standards alignment and lesson plans and project suggestions for grades 5 to college level are included.
See stackstories.com to view film trailer, view at home via Amazon Prime Video, to purchase the DVD for classroom use, or to arrange public screenings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Claudia Stack
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005748647

Claudia Stack

My background includes a B.A. from St. John’s College (1988) and an M.E.d. from Harvard University (1992). I have worked for over twenty-five years in education with a focus on at-risk and first-generation college students. My publications include numerous articles on African American school history and on rural life. In 2009, I organized the inaugural conference about African American educational history at UNC Wilmington. With my colleague Dr. Richard T. Newkirk, I present professional development entitled “Lessons from the Rosenwald Schools: Appreciating African American School History and Pedagogy.”My documentary films about historic African American schools have earned awards and were screened at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s conferences about Rosenwald schools in 2012 and 2015. They have also screened at film festivals, colleges, libraries, and many other venues. In Fall, 2017 I completed SHARECROP and SHARECROP: DELTA COTTON, documentaries that showcase oral history of the South’s “forgotten farmers.” These films have screened at festivals in major cities including London, Atlanta, Detroit. The 2018 National Council for Black Studies conference featured SHARECROP, and I developed a companion teaching guide for the film. The SHARECROP project was made possible by the generous support of the Middle Road Foundation.

Book preview

SHARECROP Companion Guide

Dr. Richard T. Newkirk shows

Trinity Washington a tobacco basket

(photo by Claudia Stack)

SHARECROP documentary and Companion Guide

made possible by the support of the Middle Road Foundation

Copyright © 2017 by Claudia Stack

For ease of use find this guide (with links) at:

stackstories.com

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Historical Introduction to Sharecropping

Teacher’s Guide to Using this Resources

Connections to Educational Standards

Film Segments: Interview Summaries and Lesson Plans

Tobacco Road

Dr. Richard T. Newkirk

Matthis Sharpless

Cotton Belt

M.C. Ausbon

Sylvester Hoover

Appalachia

Dot Jackson

John Snyder

Pauline Cannon

Other Roads

Adline Johnson

Ernest Keith

Appendix

Reproducible handouts for note-taking

Additional resources for educator

Preface

Claudia Stack, M.Ed.

My filmmaking journey began in 2003, when I decided to record oral history related to historic Rosenwald schools near my home in southeastern North Carolina. As an educator, I was fascinated by these decaying wood frame buildings that African American families had helped to build, and dismayed that the history was not more widely known. The project evolved into two feature documentaries (UNDER THE KUDZU (2012) and CARRIE MAE: AN AMERICAN LIFE (2015)), which have screened at National Trust for Historic Preservation conferences and many other venues.

I knew that African American sharecroppers had contributed greatly to school building, and that these schools played a central role in their communities. Many impoverished European Americans also sharecropped after the Civil War. How did their experiences compare? Intrigued by this and many more questions, I searched for resources about the forgotten farmers, as D.E. Conrad called them in his 1965 book, The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. I read dozens of books in the course of this project, including several memoirs of sharecropping, but Conrad’s work is one of only a few scholarly books with a tight focus on sharecropping. Searching in the documentary realm, for general audiences I found little besides the excellent film OH FREEDOM AFTER WHILE (1999), about the unusual 1939 mass protest by sharecroppers in Missouri.

So, as in my earlier film projects, I was inspired to document stories about a significant but marginalized chapter in American history. The scope of the project expanded to include Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta. To complete the film SHARECROP I was very fortunate to receive support from Elizabeth Rosenwald Varet and Michael A. Varet through their Middle Road Foundation. They also made CARRIE MAE: AN AMERICAN LIFE possible by providing me with a camera and editing equipment. Their generosity allowed me to focus my time on the film and to obtain technical support, and their encouragement always seemed to come just when I needed it most. I thank the Varets from the bottom of my heart for enabling me to document these stories before they slipped away.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the generous support of the Middle Road Foundation, which made the SHARECROP film and companion guide possible.

Heartfelt thanks to the interviewees and their families. In choosing to share your stories you affirmed that your trials and triumphs are important threads in the larger fabric of American history.

The efforts of Dr. Richard T. Newkirk, Betty Thompson, John Snyder and Leslie Randle Morton were invaluable in setting up interviews. Beverly Tetterton helped by providing background information that she obtained using her incredible research skills.

Trinity Washington did an outstanding job as narrator and singer.

The Historic Wilmington Foundation, especially Executive Director George W. Edwards and accountant Lindsay Burton, managed the grant funds and provided important administrative support.

Rich Gehron did a superlative job of filming some of the sequences and of editing the entire film, and Monte Coughlin provided invaluable promotional support.

Thanks to the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the use of the primary source documents used for some of the lesson plans in these curriculum materials.

Historical Introduction to Sharecropping

Dr. Kathryn Wall

After the Civil War, sharecropping became a defining feature of the postbellum cotton South and a major strategy for growing other southern cash crops like tobacco as well.[1] These crops had been grown by slave labor in the South prior to the war, but after the Confederate defeat, the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited the institution of slavery. The cotton mills of New England still created a demand for raw materials from southern farms, and landowners who wanted to continue to grow cotton needed workers to tend those crops. While former slaveholders might have preferred a system of gang labor overseen by white supervisors in a system that mimicked slavery as closely as possible, unsurprisingly, African Americans strongly resisted anything so closely resembling their prior condition of servitude, and sought some more equitable way to make a life for themselves and their families.[2]

With many workers of all backgrounds lacking the means to buy their own land and planters without the cash to pay laborers, the system of sharecropping evolved to as the basis of the agricultural economy in the South such that, by 1890, one in three white farmers and three of four black farmers were either tenants or sharecroppers.[3] While both tenant farming and sharecropping were systems that allowed land to be farmed by people who