" Most of the rules and customs that whites made for blacks to live by emerged from, or anyway were justified by, the whites’ ideas about blacks’ “nature.” Scrupulous financial dealings with sharecroppers were pointless, since any money the sharecroppers cleared, they would only waste. There was nothing wrong with the planters’ winking at all sorts of violations of the law by their sharecroppers, from moonshining to petty theft to polygamy to murder, because blacks had no moral life to begin with. The education of sharecroppers’ children was haphazard as a convenience to the planters, but also by design, because, in David Cohn’s words, “the Negro should be taught to work with his hands,” and real schooling “tends to unbalance him mentally.” The white ideal in the Delta was that a planter should be like a father and the sharecroppers like his children, dependent, carefree, and grateful. "

― Nicholas Lemann , The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America