After Reconstruction, most African Americans in the rural south lived in poverty and chronic debt as sharecroppers, landless farmers who gave their landlords a large portion of their crops as rent.
In this system, tenants and owners shared both the benefits but also the risks of small harvests for example. Since their earnings depended on the farm's productivity, the farmers had a more humane incentive to work harder, which is why it came as an alternative to the slave plantation system. But this system was not actually economically sustainable because the landlords had to invest in farming equipment while also paying each individual working on their land, which made this a very precarious situation for the African Americans of the rural south working in this system.
