14. Unionized African Americans Would Threaten The Sharecropping System
The rise of unions did more than threaten big businesses and make people afraid that communism might come to America. It threatened the sharecropping system that had replaced slavery in the South.
If African Americans began demanding fair pay, they would be able to get out of the perpetual debt that the white landowners kept them in. The entire Southern agricultural economy was built on slave labor; should unions disrupt that paradigm, the economic system of large plantations and King Cotton would come to a halt.
