African Americans didn't really have a political status because they weren't allowed to vote,or run for office for quite some time. When slavery ended and even as time went on African Americans didn't have a lot of money. Of course that has changed now. So their economic status also wasn't very good and a lot of them in the late 1800s and early 1900s worked on farms as sharecroppers since the majority of them were uneducated and were in poverty.