Its beautiful bolls, And bales of rich value, the Master controls. Of “mud-stills” he prates, and would haughtily bring. The world to acknowledge that “Cotton is King.” –The Gospel of Slavery, by “Iron Gray,” [Abel C. Thomas] 1864. read more
African Americans were used as slaves in agriculture, and one of the main crops was cotton. However, there were many other crops and slaves were used on them all. When colonial powers arrived from Europe, they found a land more fertile than anything they had seen in Europe. read more
Yet the cotton industry continued to be very important for blacks in the southern United States, much more so than for whites. By the late 1920s around two-thirds of all African-American tenants and almost three-fourths of the croppers worked on cotton farms. read more