The Early Activism & Jim Crow era was not successful in making meaningful progress towards equality in America. A prime example of this is sharecropping. Sharecropping was when a landowner would allow some of his land to be rented out, and in return, he would typically take between 13 and 23 of the crop harvested. Ideally, sharecropping would be a good way for newly freed African Americans to create upward mobility for themselves and their families, but in reality, they were exploiting these people and not allowing them to have any significant economic growth. They did this because they wanted to keep people working their fields without pay since they could no longer use slaves. Meaning they essentially used slavery under a different name.
