Sharecroppers Quotes

“I asked [Selma mayor Joe] Smitherman about his own attitude toward the Confederacy. He responded by telling me about his childhood in the Depression, as the son of sharecroppers. "We were dirt poor," he said. "My father died when I was a few months old and my mother raised the six of us on welfare. For us, the Civil War was pride. It was all we had to hold onto. The rich whites, they had ancestors who were colonel this or general that. But we didn't know anything about that. It was just pride in having once been something.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War