Tenant Farming Quotes

My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.

I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.

My grandmother was a sharecropper. That wasn't even that long ago! My grandma was a sharecropper.

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something.

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed, included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college.

I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta, and maybe that's because sharecropping was a fairly recent phenomena. I feel like the past is closer and it bears even more heavily on the present there than it does in the rest of the state.

I come here with almost nothing and I am holding my own well, so you may not get angry for trading my team off. I have determined to get my land on some terms, I am not going back to Indiana to rent until I bust entirely and have to walk back.

Sometimes we followed the crops, doing migrant labor. We did several years of tenant farming in Western Oregon starting in the early '50s. Later, my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland.