I recently read an article
in the New Yorker that so shocked me that I knew I had to tell you, my
small audience, all about it. Vast tracts of land owned by African Americans
were taken from them in the 20th century. At the heart of the story
is racism in many forms: how the promise of emancipation after the Civil War
was broken; how whites used bureaucracy and twisted legalisms to take black
land from owners too poor to defend themselves; how the teaching of American
history was whitewashed to bury this story. I was shocked because, after
decades of studying history, I had no idea about this fundamental cause of
economic inequality in America. Writing this article pushed me into
investigating the even larger story of how black Americans were prevented from
owning real estate, one of the fundamental sources of wealth.
Here’s a short version of the
history. At the time of Emancipation, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman
declared that 400,000 acres formerly held by Confederates be given to African
Americans. His order came to be known as the promise of “40 acres and a mule”.
But the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau was never able to control enough
land to fulfill this promise. In 1866, Congress passed the Southern
Homestead Act, opening up 46 million acres of public land in southern
states for Union supporters and freed slaves. The land was uncultivated forest
and swamp, difficult
for penniless former slaves to acquire or use. Southern bureaucrats made it
difficult for blacks to access any land and southern whites used violence to
prevent blacks from occupying land. Within 6 months, the land was opened to
former rebels. In 1876, the law was repealed.
The much more extensive Homestead
Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of government land in the West to any
American who applied and worked the land for 5 years. Over the course of the
next 60 years, 246 million acres of western land, the area of California plus
Texas, was given to individuals for free. About 1.5 million families were given
a crucial economic foundation. Only about 5000 African Americans benefitted.
Despite obstacles, many black
families had acquired farmland by World War I. There were nearly 1 million
black farms in 1920, about one-seventh
of all American farms, mostly in the South. During the 20th
century, nearly all of this land was taken or destroyed by whites. Sometimes
this happened by violent mob action, as in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, or the
lesser known pogrom in Pierce City, Missouri, in 1901, when the entire black
community of 300 was driven from town. A map
shows many of the hundreds of these incidents of white collective violence,
concentrated in the South. Many of the thousands of lynchings were directed at
black farmers in order to terrorize all blacks and make them leave.
Other methods had a more
legal appearance. Over 75 years, the black community of Harris Neck, Georgia,
developed a thriving economy from fishing, hunting and gathering oysters, on
land deeded to a former slave by a plantation owner in 1865. In 1942, the
federal government took gave residents two weeks notice
to leave, their houses were destroyed,
and an Air Force base was created. That site was chosen by the local white
politicians. Black families were paid two-thirds of what white families got per
acre. Now the former African American community is the Harris Neck National
Wildlife Refuge.
Vast amounts of black
property were taken by unscrupulous individual use of legal trickery, because
African Americans did not typically use the white-dominated legal system to
pass property to their heirs. White developers and speculators took advantage
of poorly documented ownership through so-called partition sales to acquire
land that had been in black families for generations. One family’s story is
highlighted in the New Yorker article, co-published with ProPublica.
The 2001 Agricultural Census estimated that about 80% of black-owned farmland
had disappeared in the South since 1969, about half
lost through partition sales.
Decades of
discrimination by the federal government made it especially difficult for
black farmers to retain their land as farming modernized. The Department of
Agriculture denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to
survival in a capital-intensive farm structure, and hundreds of thousands of
black farmers lost their land. Even under President Obama, discrimination
against black farmers by the USDA continued.
Because land was taken by so
many different methods across the US, and the takers were not interested in
recording their thefts clearly, it is impossible to know how much black land
was taken. The authors of the New Yorker article say bluntly, “Between 1910 and
1997, African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland.” That loss cost black
families hundreds
of billions of dollars. In 2012, less than 2 percent of farmers were black,
according to the most
recent Agricultural Census.
While rural blacks lost land,
real estate holdings of urban blacks were wiped out by a combination of
government discrimination and private exploitation. Because black families
could not get regular mortgages due to redlining by banks, if they wanted to
buy a house they had to resort to private land sale contracts, in which the
price was inflated and no equity was earned until the entire contract was paid
off. If the family moved or missed one payment, they lost everything. A recent
study of this practice in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s showed that black
families lost up to $4 billion in today’s dollars.
For the first time in
decades, reparations for African Americans who were victimized by the white
federal and state governments are being discussed seriously. This story about
whites taking black property shows how superficial, disingenuous and
ahistorical are the arguments made by conservatives against reparations. When
Sen. Mitch McConnell delivered his
simplistic judgment last month, he was continuing the cover-up of modern
white real estate theft: “I don't think reparations for something that happened
150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good
idea.”
Surveys which demonstrate
that the majority of white Americans are against reparations only demonstrate
how ignorance of America’s modern history informs both public opinion and survey
questions. Gallup asked, “Do you think the government should – or should
not – make cash payments to black Americans who are descendants of slaves?”
While blacks were in favor 73% to 25%, whites were opposed 81% to 16%. A
different question might elicit a more useful response: Do you think the
government should make cash payments to millions of black Americans whose
property was stolen by whites and who were financially discriminated against by
American government since World War II?
Today’s economic gap between
black and white began with slavery. Emancipation freed slaves, but left them
with nothing. Hundreds of millions of acres of land were given away to white
families. When blacks gradually managed to get some land, it was taken by
violence and legal trickery during the 20th century. After World War
II, blacks were denied access to another giant government economic program, the
GI Bill, which helped millions of white veterans acquire houses. The collusion
of federal, state and local governments, banks, and real estate professionals
bilked African Americans of billions of dollars in real estate, with the subprime mortgage
crisis only a decade ago as the latest chapter. What I have written here is
only an outline of the racist narrative.
Despite the ravages of
slavery, the American story would have been very different if the ideas and
practices behind Lincoln’s Emancipation had been put into effect. Instead,
white supremacy reemerged in the South and throughout the US. The power that
white supremacists exerted in 20th-century America is symbolized by James F. Byrnes, a
South Carolina politician, who served in the House of Representatives
1911-1925, was one of the most influential Senators 1931-1941, was appointed to
the Supreme Court by FDR, but then led the Office of Economic Stabilization and
the Office of War Mobilization during World War II, became Secretary of State
1945-1947, and was Governor of South Carolina 1951-1955. In 1919, he offered
his theory of American race relations: “This is a white man’s country, and will
always remain a white man’s country.” He followed that motto throughout his
career.
Our nation is still paying
the price.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
July 30, 2019
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