Riley Martin's background
was that of a sharecropper kid |
Sharecroppers ~ Little Rock, Arkansas ~ October 1935
|
What follows are photographs
in the life of a sharecropper. |
Lets just say one of these kids is Riley Martin.
This photo was taken ten years before Riley was born though little has changed in the south in those years. |
What schooling did a few lucky sharecropper kids get? |
What was the school's annual budget? It was almost nothing in those days in the south. What kind of education did Riley receive in Arkansas as a sharecropper? I think you the reader received a superior 7th grade education compared to a sharecropper kid lucky to be even sent to a school. (Riley says: they knew I was different). When Riley was 18 he was taken by alien beings in their small space craft... left the Earth and sailed out near the planet Saturn to a huge alien Mothership. While there the alien... Riley calls... Tan... placed on Riley's head an educational headset and... download the history of humanity, alien insights, and a whole lot more...plus beautiful symbols by the thousands all loaded into Riley's rather empty brain. You'll begin to know where his education came from when your read the first page of the foreword written in an elegant manner for a person such as Riley Martin. |
Saturn Earth Connection
introduction ~ home page |
.Riley Connection
.sharecropper kid |
Venus Tesla Connection introduction ~ home page
|
Sharecropping appeared in the Southeastern United States, including Appalachia, after the Civil War as a way to continue post-slavery white supremacy over African Americans, but it ultimately included poor whites as well. It was a way to avoid the now illegal possession of slaves while at the same time keeping workers for labor in a subordinate manner. Although former slaves and their descendants composed the majority of sharecroppers, the poor whites joined the blacks in their struggles against the landowners by the end of the sharecropping era. Sharecropping by definition is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion, usually half, of the crops or the revenue that they bring in for the landowner. In return for the work on the land, the landowners supply the tenants and their families with living accommodations, seeds and fertilizer, tools, and food that can be bought in a commissary, charging fairly high interest rates to the tenants. These rates create an environment of debt and poverty that the sharecroppers have trouble escaping from. When they receive their portion of the money from the crops, the debts that they have procured comes out of their half of the money. Often this leaves the sharecropper with virtually nothing. Between the debt and the hard working conditions, a second form of slavery is created. It was not slavery with a person literally being owned but one of holding a person because they have no choice to go elsewhere. The landowners were the dominant persons in society while the workers were still on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Although it may initially seem that the idea of sharecropping was a good one because it gave jobs to the former slaves, there were too many abuses in the system for it to have created a steady or fair environment for all the people involved. There were downfalls and abuses in the system of sharecropping. The white landowners treated the workers minimally better than they were treated as slaves. People watched them with rigid supervision and drove them to their limit. Along with the physical poor treatment, the sharecroppers were cheated out of their money in multiple ways. Since the owners had control of the accounts of all of the sharecroppers, the books could be fixed in order to make the fifty percent that the workers earned, less than what it should be. The bookkeeping was tampered with to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The previously mentioned interest rates were also very effective in keeping the sharecroppers in their place as subordinates. The debts would get to be so large that the workers would eventually be working just to pay off the debt. They ended up in a perpetual race to climb out of poverty and high interest debt. The final abuse of the system came because of the insistence on having a single cash crop. This did not allow for the possibility for the demand of other crops, and this practice led to the eventual demise of the sharecropping system. The system collapsed with the coming of farm mechanization and reduced need for cotton. Both the mechanization and the reduced need for cotton resulted in the need for less people working on the farms. These lessening demands led to the complete collapse of the system. There was no reason to employ so many workers any longer. Although the unemployment rates skyrocketed, the people were finally free of being slaves to the farms. They have not gained their freedom everywhere throughout the world though. There are some places in Latin America where sharecropping can still be found but it is not as common as it once was. Until recent times, sharecropping could still be experienced and observed in the Appalachian region, specifically in Alabama. Walker Evans and James Agee exposed the poverty-stricken ways of life for a sharecropping home during the aftermath of the Depression. Agee's quasi-fictional work, combined with Evan's photography of real life situations on the tenant farm, resulted in the work Let is Now praise Famous Men. When Agee's study was finally published in 1941, the country had a war on its hands and not enough time to concentrate on sharecropping and its downfalls. It was soon to disappear from Appalachia, the South, and America. With sharecropping gone it can now be said that slavery on the farms is truly abolished. |
The life of a sharecropper
|
Alexander plantation
Pulaski County, Arkansas. October 1935 |
Sharecroppers kids as adults hardly
have the skill to write their own name. |
Sharecropping
by Amanda McCullough |
Saturn Earth Connection
introduction ~ home page |
.Riley Connection
.sharecropper kid |
Saturn Earth Connection
introduction ~ home page |
.Riley Connection
.sharecropper kid |
Venus Tesla Connection introduction ~ home page
|
Venus Tesla Connection introduction ~ home page
|
Front porch of tenant farmer's house
Photo by Russell Lee ~ June 1939 |
Cotton pickers at 6:30 a.m.
Alexander plantation, Pulaski County, Arkansas October 1935 |
Not all sharecroppers were black.
Poor whites worked the farm for a meal and a roof over their heads. |
The families of evicted sharecroppers of the Dibble plantation. They were legally evicted the week of January 12, 1936, the plantation having charged that by membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union they were engaging in a conspiracy to retain their homes; this contention granted by the court, the eviction, though at the point of a gun, was quite legal. The pictures were taken just after the evictions before they were moved into the tent colony they later enjoyed.
Photo by John Vachon ~ Near Parkin, Arkansas ~ January 1936 |
Evicted Union activist
Photo by Dorothea Lange July 1936 |
State highway officials moving sharecroppers.
Photo by Arthur Rothstein, January 1939 |
Saturn Earth Connection
introduction ~ home page |
.Riley Connection
.sharecropper kid |
Saturn Earth Connection
introduction ~ home page |
.Riley Connection
.sharecropper kid |
Venus Tesla Connection introduction ~ home page
|
Venus Tesla Connection introduction ~ home page
|
How can
the education of a sharecropper impress a physician specializing in surgery? The doctor said they talked for hours about health and the human body. |
How can
the education of a sharecropper come to impress an engineer specializing in rocket propulsion? He didn't want his colleagues or wife hear he wanted to talk with Riley. |
How can
the education of a sharecropper know the history of humanity and the history of this planet? He was shown the alien history as well. |
How can
the education of a sharecropper have the ability to write a brilliant 593 page manuscript? Written without mistakes. |
This page was designed to illustrate the huge jump in education Riley received while on an alien mothership located near Saturn. On Riley's second of his three trips to the Mothership the alien O-Qua Tangin Wann placed on Riley's head a form of alien computerized headset and loaded into him what he knows. Riley did not learn what he knows of the history
of humanity from a school a select few sharecropper kids attended. Curtis Cooperman |
This cotton sharecropper kid Riley Martin
received an education not found on Earth. |
Riley was taken to what he described as an alien mothership near the planet Saturn and educated... in comparison to our slow education... his took a matter of minutes or seconds.
|
Now for a few big questions
|
Riley Martin original book
The Coming of Tan |
Riley was educated by celestial beings
only what they taught him... nothing else |
last update
26 January 2012 ~ 17:25 EST |
Hello Earth
Historicity Productions Located on the left bank |
looking down river
New Jersey on the left Pennsylvania on the right |
www.hello-earth.com
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www.helloearth.info
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Venus Tesla Connection introduction ~ home page
|
Saturn Earth Connection
introduction ~ home page |
.Riley Connection
.sharecropper kid |