SNCC and Black Farmers
King & Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, 1940, Courtesy of The New York Public Library
The former U. S. Department of Agriculture administrator Shirley Sherrod a native of Georgia. In the 1960s She and her husband Charles Sherrod served as SNCC organizers helping poor farmers develop and market food products that they could sell and thus become financially and politically independent. Financial independence gave black farmers the option to engage in civil rights activism. The oppressive system of tenant farming, the crop lien system, and sharecropping in the post civil war south kept so many black farmers in peonage and disenfranchised Because if they sought to register to vote the wealthy white landowners they rented from and worked for would expel them off their land and/or fire them.
