Final answer:
Most African American sharecroppers in the 1800s a. used crop proceeds to pay rent to white landowners, often remaining in debt and unable to buy their own land due to the sharecropping and crop-lien systems.
Step-by-step explanation:
The statement that best describes most African American sharecroppers of the 1800s is that a. they used crop proceeds to pay rent to white landowners. After the Civil War, many former slaves and impoverished whites turned to sharecropping, a system where they would farm land they did not own.
Sharecroppers would pay the landowner with a portion of the crops they raised, typically a substantial part, often leaving them in a continual state of indebtedness and without the means to purchase land of their own. This system ensured that freed people could often not attain independent livelihoods, keeping them economically dependent and reinforcing a hierarchy beneficial to the landowners.
The crop-lien system further exacerbated the poverty of sharecroppers by forcing them to assume the risks and finance many aspects of production, yet they were essentially wage laborers who were paid last after all other parties were satisfied. As a result, sharecropping and the associated legal and economic structures ensured that African American farmers remained tied to the land they worked with little hope of economic advancement.