The organization that worked to help newly freed slaves by providing education, clothing, food, and jobs was the Freedmen's Bureau.
One of the few opportunities a newly freed slave could take was sharecropping, which is a farming system in which former slaves and poor whites were trapped in a cycle of debt. In this system, sharecroppers would work land owned by someone else in exchange for a share of the crops, often leading to a situation where they owed more to the landowner than they could earn, resulting in persistent poverty.