A sharecropper in the south usually needed to?

Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land mule, and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit.

By the early 1870s, the system known as sharecropping had come to dominate agriculture across the cotton-planting South. Under this system, black families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves; in return, they would give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the year.