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48 Hum. Rts. 4 (2022-2023)
The Contemporary Relevance of Historic Black Land Loss

handle is hein.journals/huri48 and id is 34 raw text is: The Contemporary Relevance of Historic Black Land Loss By Dania V. Francis, Grieve Chelwa, Darrick Hamilton, Thomas W. Mitchell, Nathan A. Rosenberg, and Bryce Wilson Stucki ~j~1 '7 uke McElroy, a Black farmer who owned 155 acres of land in Cherokee County, Alabama, was shot to death in 1949 by a neighboring white farmer over a property dispute. In Amite County, Mississippi, Rever- end Isaac Simmons, also a Black farmer, was lynched by six white men in 1944 when he refused to give up his farmland to the men, who thought it might have valuable oil deposits. The men then bru- tally beat Reverend Simmons's son and ran him out of the county. The stories of these men and many others in the Burnham-Nobles Archive of racially motivated killings of Black people in the Jim Crow South highlight the vio- lent theft of Black farmland, often to the benefit of white farmers. At the close of the Civil War, Black Americans owned very little farmland but began acquiring it at a rapid pace, so that by 1910, Black farmers owned more than 16 million acres. This, however, would be the peak of Black farmland ownership in the United States as the twentieth century oversaw the rapid dispossession of Black- owned agricultural acreage. In addition to theft by state-sanctioned violence, intimidation, and lynching, Black farmers also lost land due to discrimina- tion by banks and financial institutions; through the denial of access to federal farm benefits by local administrators who fun- neled those benefits to white farm owners; through forced partition sales brought about by predatory third parties; through government misuse of eminent domain, including many cases in which Black landowners were compensated well below market value; through discriminatory tax assessments and non-competitive tax sales; and through longstanding, coordinated discrimination by U.S. Department of Agriculture agents who wield power and control over access to credit and essen- tial resources. By 1997, Black farmers lost more than 90 percent of the 16 million acres they owned in 1910. In a recent study, we used county-level Census of Agriculture data to estimate the value of the lost Black agricultural land from 1920 to 1997. For all counties in each of the 17 (mostly southern) states that comprised over 90 percent of all Black-owned farmland, we calculated the yearly acreage loss, multiplied by the county-level estimate of per-acre land values. We then compounded those land- loss values forward to the year 2020 at a rate of return of 6 percent per year for the appreciation of the land and a rate of return of 5 percent per year for the income the land could provide. Our results yield a cumulative value of Black land loss of about $326 billion. To put this figure in perspective, if this repre- sented the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country, that country would rank 41st out of 213 countries in the world ranking 4 hrnarrights

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