Today in the U.S., 43.4 percent of Black Americans are homeowners, compared with 72.1 percent of white people, 51.1 percent of the Latinx population, and 53 percent of AAPI/Indigenous/Other. Homeownership is the biggest contributor to wealth and wealth transfer between generations. History shows us that Black homeownership has been stifled at every turn. While redlining may be a more well-known part of the story, the deceptive practices I’ve explored here were just as effective, from the Torrens Act to heirs’ property and partition sales.
Black land theft is not a topic heavily discussed, but like redlining, it allows people to see that African Americans falling “behind” financially is not because they don’t try, but because every time they had a chance to get ahead laws, rules, regulations, and those with power used the system to bend the rules to take from them. When it comes to Black land theft, it wasn’t just government institutions, it was white people who had the money and knew the laws they could use to swindle African American landowners.
The rules and laws in place allowed white people to use government rules and institutions to not only steal land but enrich themselves once they got a hold of it. And because this massive theft was accomplished through thousands of small transactions over decades, it was easy for the rest of us to look the other way.
Black land theft today isn’t as prevalent and blatant, and new wealth extraction schemes have gained prominence. But what the story of Black land theft in the 20th century tells us is that if no one is asking questions about what thousands of small financial transactions add up to in a nation that was founded on slavery, then we are positioning ourselves — by design or not — to miss the next wealth extraction schemes for decades as well. In a country where the typical white family still has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family, and the racial wealth divide is getting worse, we can’t afford not to ask these questions.
Black land theft happened from the 20th century to the 21st century, and it had major impacts on the lives of African American landowners and their descendants.
“When they steal your land, they steal your future,” explains Stephanie Hagans, whose family lost 35 acres in Matthews, North Carolina in 1942.
We don’t know what life would be like if all that land hadn’t been stolen, but African Americans’ financial futures might have looked very different.
Tykeisa Nesbitt has interned on the Isoureconomyfair.org project led by Ericka Taylor, popular education manager with the Take on Wall Street campaign. To learn more about the hidden history of Black wealth extraction in the United States, visit the site.