Answer: In some ways, emancipation and Reconstruction broke the power of white southern planters over their labor force. Freedpeople negotiated with planters over how the land would be cultivated and how they would be compensated. African-American families worked small plots independently, sometimes obtaining land for cash or, more commonly, for a fixed share of the year’s crop; this latter practice was known as sharecropping. By 1870, sharecropping was the dominant means by which African Americans could gain access to land in the South. Still, freedpeople desired independent proprietorship. In this interview, African-American farmer Henry Blake recalls how black land ownership became an elusive goal as unequal power relations between white and black hardened and the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist campaigns increased. Blake’s narrative and many others were recorded during an ambitious New Deal (1936–38) program of interviews with ex-slaves. Despite unfamiliar interviewers and distant memories, these first-person accounts are an unparalleled resource.