Historic white theft of Black land continues today. Reparations should begin there.
The coronavirus pandemic reminds us daily of the inequality institutional racism has imposed on Black Americans. Among the many generations-old ongoing drivers of racial inequality is the theft of Black land.
On Juneteenth 2019 the House Judiciary Committee held a dramatic, historic hearing on a commission to develop proposals for reparations for the damage slavery inflicted on African Americans.
Reparations awarded to the descendants of slavery is controversial. Just 15 percent of whites favor the idea while three out of four Blacks favor it. Preventing the continuing theft of valuable Black farmland and providing compensation is one practical way to address reparations.
Critics oppose reparations for “something that happened 150 years ago.” But the causes of the vast wealth gap between Blacks and whites are not rooted in a distant past. The theft of Black land continues today. Reparations can begin by ending ongoing economic injustices.
During the past 150 years, whites have stolen millions of acres of Black farmland worth billions of dollars. After slavery when freed people began to buy land, successful Black farmers often became targets of unprovoked violence by white mobs that ended with their land owned by whites.
In the mid-twentieth century discrimination by federal agricultural agencies and private lenders forced many Black farmers into foreclosure. Wealthy landowners, mostly white, then bought the land below market value.
Between 1910 and 1997 African Americans lost 98 percent of their farmland. Black families were vulnerable because not trusting Southern white courts they did not have wills.
Absent a will, Black land becomes “heirs’ property,” with descendants owning shares each with the ability to sell his or her interest. Land speculators can find one family member willing to sell their share, then the white buyer can legally petition courts to order a sale of the entire land without the rest of the family’s consent.
These “partition sales” result in bargains for buyers and the loss of land Black families have owned for generations. Fourteen states have recently enacted laws to protect heir’s property owners. In 2016 South Carolina joined them.
But from the 1950s on, nothing protected that state’s Black owners of prime coastal land from white developers, speculators and corporations. They fell victim to tax sales fabricated by collusion between outside buyers and local tax assessors who over-valued Black land or suddenly boosted assessments to force Blacks to sell.
Brochures for Hilton Head resorts treat the distinctive surviving Black Gullah population that once owned the land as a tourist attraction.
In North Carolina partition sales continue. A July 2019 ProPublica/New Yorker report found “hundreds” of partition actions filed there every year. They inundate coastal Carteret County and its quaint seat of Beaufort, tourist attractions since the 1970s.
Forty-two percent of partition sales took place among Carteret’s Black population of six percent.
North Carolina resists reform of heirs’ property law.
In 2018 Congress acted to make it easier for heirs’ property owners to apply for federal loan programs. Last December the Senate overwhelmingly approved the House’s appropriation of $5 million to assist families with heir’s property to resolve ownership issues.
The September 2019 Atlantic published a report describing the taking of millions of acres of Black farmland in the Mississippi Delta. There too “legal theft” disguised illegal discrimination by federal agencies and private bankers, swindles, and the collusion of tax assessors.
The Delta has attracted Wall Street corporations that now own hundreds of thousands of acres of rich alluvial plain. Full disclosure: the pension fund TIAA is one of the new landlords, so I may own a sliver of the Delta.
In 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama proposed investing in policies to overcome current discrimination and disadvantage rather than reparations. Addressing the ongoing loss of Black wealth in land should be one of those policies.
As William Faulkner said, “the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past.”
Ron Formisano is the author of “Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor” (Johns Hopkins University 2015).