New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act Evicts Black Sharecroppers

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a cornerstone of the New Deal, paid subsidies to landowners to reduce crop production. White landowners used these payments to mechanize and evict Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers instead of sharing benefits as intended. Hundreds of thousands of Black farming families were displaced across the South between 1933 and 1940. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union, formed in 1934, documented widespread evictions. Black sharecroppers received a fraction of promised payments when they received any at all. The AAA was administered locally by all-white county committees.