Was there really slavery in 1926?

I don't think they were slaves, they were either tenant farmers -share croppers - or migrant workers. Probably share croppers. But in the South, in that time period, it wasn't too much different than slavery.

You should look up 'sharecropping' sometime.

When the stars are the only things we share
Will you be there?

-Benjamin Francis Leftwich

My understanding of history was that while there technically wasn't slavery. In practice there wasn't improved conditions.

Many blacks ended up staying on the plantations because they had no where to go. Imagine one day you are freed, but there's no home, job, means to cloth or eat, and no where to go. So what do you do? I'd imagine by staying on the plantations they'd at least have a roof over their heads and something to eat. It would be a tough decision to leave into the unknown.

Not only that there was segregation. Basically a lot of prejudice and rules and behaviors to make black people feel inferior.

There was also a lot of economic punishment of the South after the civil war in retaliation of their defiance.

He states in the movie they were share croppers.

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Sharecropping took over afterwards. Now peonage did become a thing up through the 1920s. Blacks were the main target but poor whites and European immigrants could be forced into it as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon

No. Slavery became illegal in 1865, but that didn't stop the people in South from creating a new form of "slavery" by passing black codes to prevent the newly freed slaves from having the same privileges as white people during that time. Many slaves stayed on the same plantations where they originally had worked, but now the "master" was their "boss," and he was forced to pay them and couldn't stop them from leaving unless he had them in debt to him. Others left the plantations and went to find work elsewhere.

For the next century, blacks were still treated like second-class citizens. They had those BS "separate but equal" laws for a long time. Politicians also found other ways to enslave black people, they just couldn't use the law to do it. One way was LBJ's "war on poverty," whose sole purpose was to keep them poor and voting for free handouts from Democrats. Another was finding indirect ways of discriminating against blacks, such as red-lining real-estate areas, or setting up tests designed to have blacks fail at due to poverty and a different culture.

Despite all this, the black community still managed to fight (with whites who supported them) to get equal rights in the 1960s, and things changed a lot for them after that.

So no, slavery was not legal by 1926, but blacks were treated like crap in that era.