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My parents were sharecroppers in Arkansas until 1951, when my dad dared stand up to his boss for not paying him a fair wage at the agricultural weigh station.

Butler was born to sharecropper parents on Dec. 8, 1939, in Sunflower, Miss., and moved at age 3 with his family to Chicago.

Wilson, the son of North Carolina sharecroppers, became one of the first Black reporters on air in Los Angeles in 1969.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 allowed white landowners to keep government benefit payments instead of passing them onto Black sharecroppers who were actually farming the land.

Was that influenced by the two years you spent as a tobacco sharecropper in North Carolina?