ABSTRACT
Many sharecroppers were cheated by plantation owners’ accounting methods, but to complain of being cheated by a white planter would be fruitless and indeed dangerous. The psychological and intellectual cost to African Americans of living under Jim Crow was terrible. For their personal safety black children had to learn to defer to white individuals of all ages and conditions and to suppress reasonable outrage at indignities and mistreatment. The emigration of black Southerners was resisted by planters through threats, interceptions, and attacks on recruiters. The migration slowed during the 1930s, when jobs were scarce throughout the country, but even then another four hundred thousand left the South. Most immigrants from abroad from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries could afford only the cheapest housing and gravitated to communities with people of like origin. Non-governmental organizations conducted housing audits, especially under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973, which supported a variety of anti-poverty jobs in non-profit organizations.
