[Cicero]

It's just possible, in some remote rural district. It would be similar to those stories you occasionally see about parents who keep their children in a closet until they're twelve years old--that kind of thing. In other words, human perversity is capable of just about anything. But this was not any kind of common practice.

Share cropping, yes. No doubt that was exploitative, but people WERE free to pick up and move if they chose to.

[Smokin' Joe]

I believe it was poor white coal miners (they weren't black, they just looked that way--after work) who owed their souls to the company store.

They lived in conditions tantamount to slavery, too. That has changed, but the only reparations are for black lung disease, something they got from working.

[Old Professer]

In 1973 when I lived in Ohio, a black guy there owned some property in Mississippi that he had sharecroppers farming for him - they were white people; he planned to retire there after he left the place he was working.

[johnb838]

Share cropping, yes. No doubt that was exploitative,

True, but it was nothing worse than what our ancestors left Europe on account of -- serfdom.