Answer:
Sharecropping means that a person farms property belonging to someone else for a share of the crop. It is a way that a farmer without land can earn many and a land-owner can get a return from his fields without out farming it himself. Plantation owners lost their slave labor and so had more land than then could farm themselves and no cash with which to hire workers.
So share-cropping was an answer. I would think sharecropping would have about the same effect on African Americans as on anybody else.
