First, identify and list a few interesting or important facts from the article “Without Independence, Freedom Is Just a Word.” Then write the very beginning of a story that could take place in the Southern United States during the Great Depression. Write at least three paragraphs, and include your selected facts in a way that would help readers imagine what life was like for one or more characters. Without Independence, Freedom Is Just a Word:
Imagine you’re an African American farmer living in Mississippi in the 1930s. Your
grandparents were most likely slaves, but you were born after emancipation. You
live in a tiny, shabby cabin and work a small plot of land to grow cotton. You would
rather grow vegetables to eat and to sell, but your landlord gets to decide what crop
you will grow. He also requires—as a condition of the lease—that you sell your crops
only to him. Your whole family works long days, first planting, then tending, and finally
harvesting the cotton. You hope to make enough money from the sale to buy food and
other necessities in the year ahead. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a little extra money to
put aside. However, the entire country is in the midst of a Great Depression, and the
price of cotton has fallen sharply. Moreover, your landlord has set a price for your cotton
that is unfairly low. After you harvest your crop, settle up with the landlord, and pay your
bills, you find yourself left with less than nothing, which means you’ll begin the next
planting cycle in debt. You’re a free person, according to the Constitution, but you’re
also a farmer without a farm. You are a sharecropper.
Sharecropping as a system developed in the ruins of the post-Civil-War South. Long
before the war, America’s southern states had built booming economies based on
agriculture. Wealthy southern landowners ran large plantations where they grew
tobacco, sugar, rice, and most of all, cotton. The success of those crops depended on
the use of enslaved Africans for labor. The southern Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil
War brought an end to the shameful practice of slavery and marked the beginning
of the end of the plantations. Other farming practices had to take their place, and
newly freed slaves needed a way to support themselves and their families. To many,
sharecropping seemed like a solution.
Forty Acres and a Mule
On April 9, 1865, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces.
President Abraham Lincoln knew, however, that winning the Civil War would not be
the end of the conflict between the northern and southern states. He understood that a
“great task” would follow: to bring the southern states back into the Union and to rebuild
them after the devastation of war. On April 14, Lincoln was assassinated before he
could carry out his plan for Reconstruction of the South. With not plan in place, about
four million African Americans, who went from slaves to free people overnight, were left
with no means to support themselves.