“It was in the [post Civil War] South that the crop-lien system was most brutal. By this system the farmer would get the things he needed from the merchant: the use of the cotton gin at harvest time, whatever supplies were necessary. He didn’t have money to pay, so the merchant would get a lien—a mortgage on his crop–on which the farmer might pay 25 percent interest. . . . The man with the ledger became to the farmer “the furnishing man,” to black farmers simply “the Man.” The farmer would owe more money every year until finally his farm was taken away and he became a tenant.”

—Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States; 1492-Present, 1999.