| Born between the early 1890s and the 1930s, all grew up poor, most came from farming families, and many were sharecroppers. |
| The book opens in 1874 in Delta, Louisiana, on the plantation where Walker's parents were sharecroppers. |
| His mission was to capture the poverty-stricken lives of rural sharecroppers. |
| Blacks who owned small farms and also rented or sharecropped were often identified as renters or sharecroppers in the census. |
| And life was almost as bleak for white tenant farmers and sharecroppers as it was for slaves, who often worked alongside them in the fields. |
| As southern cotton growers reduced production in return for federal payments, sharecroppers and tenant farmers were driven from the land. |
