Black Land Ownership

I have to say land ownership is the epitome of White privilege. This allows for generational wealth or even a level of security. I know you may think Black people have the same opportunity to buy real estate as well. That would not be completely accurate, especially since the end of the Civil War, but as recent as 2020.

At the end of the Civil War, former slaves were not given any land. Most either didn’t have the means to buy land or were not legally allowed to buy land. As a result, they saw sharecropping as a way to survive. Theoretically, the landowner allowed the former slave to use his land to grow crops and share a portion of the harvest/sale of the crop as compensation for use of the land. However, most landowners found ways to abuse the process and cheat the former slave, so the they would owe the landowner year after year. This tied them to the land and was basically another form of slavery.

I’ll skip ahead a bit, some Blacks are able to acquire land. However, it is a constant struggle to keep their land because laws were enacted to restrict Black land ownership. Covenants were put in place that restricted where Blacks could buy property. Redlining was employed by banks that could prevent giving loans to Blacks or give them unfair/unequal loan terms. Whites used intimidation tactics to run Blacks away and in some cases kill them.

So in a nutshell, Black land ownership is far from simple or fair. I will expand on this further in a future article with examples of instances where land was illegal taken as well as ways it was taken through legal manipulation. (Hilton Head SC, Mound Bayou MS, Tulsa (Greenwood District) OK, etc.)