(Program 10715)
Guest: Deacon Larry Oney

Bigotry dies a slow death. Whether it rules a singular heart or the soul of an entire nation, racism can take generations to resolve, if it’s ever altogether resolved.  And so it was that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, racial prejudice still existed to greater or lesser degree throughout the United States.  

One place this injustice was keenly felt was in the South on its plantations. There, a new kind of bondage existed even though slavery was officially abolished. It was the sharecropper system, a system that impoverished more African Americans than it financially benefited. 

What was the reality of this system? What effect did it have on those who lived it? And how could the impressionable mind of a child be shaped and formed by it? Our guest knows the answers to these questions. He grew up a sharecropper’s son.