The land lost to time12/17/2022 ![]() Targeted them with arsons and lynchings, over 425,000 Black families were able Worked them ragged, white politicians disenfranchised them, and white mobs Even as white creditors cheated them, white planters In their struggle to create a new society, amid universal oppression and disadvantage, Black families acquired property at anĪbout 20 percent of Black farm families owned their land, and by 1910 that figure War destroyed the basis of wealth in the Old South-slavery-and with it a system Iterative-growing slowly at first, adding to itself, and accumulating andĮxpanding over time-this blow to a nascent Black middle class has reverberated ![]() Sheer will, emerged in the aftermath of slavery. This enormous loss not only cost the families who saw their land andĭreams taken from them, but destroyed a rural Black middle class that had, by Historical data from 1920 to 1997 and found that the lost wealth and incomeįrom the land totals about $326 billion-roughly the size of Hong Kong’s annual gross domestic product. Proceedings journal, our team conducted a comprehensive analysis of For the first time, in a forthcoming paper to be published in the American Economic Association’s Papers and The scale of this deliberate, state-sanctioned dispossession, no one hasĮstimated how much Black families lost. Since then, they have lost roughly 90 percent of that acreage. Would ever own within the United States,” according to the historian Manning UnderĬonditions of savage oppression, Black families emerged in the early 1900s withĪlmost 20 million acres of farmland and “the largest amount of property they Their differences aside to send the exceeding majority of federal funds toĬommercial farmers, almost all of them white men.įarmers not only lost out on these massive subsidies-they have beenĮffectively disenfranchised within the modern agricultural system. Whitten’s political career to the present, lawmakers in both parties have set Were no less committed to defending rich white farmers. Whitten was less abashed in his racism than many of his fellow lawmakers, they He onceĮxplained to Senator George McGovern that if “hunger was not a problem, s The 59 percent of his district that lived below the poverty line. Who made up 0.3 percent of his district-and just $4 million in food stamps for Southern Place on Earth, Whitten secured $23.5 million for wealthy farmers “typical year” in the 1960s, writes historian James Cobb in The Most The “Permanent Secretary of Agriculture.” House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture for over four decades, heĮxercised so much control over the department’s budget that he became known as Representative from Mississippi never worked for USDA, but as chair of the Were reflected in the policies he supported: floods of cash for wealthy whiteįarmers and next to nothing for Black farmers. Of Congress and future secretary of agriculture, as “boy.” Whitten’s prejudices “racial intermingling” and ended it by referring to Mike Espy, a Black member His career by eliminating a federal agency because its studies encouraged Jamie Whitten Building, named in 1994, honors a member of Congress who started Located on the third floor of a building named after a white supremacist. Office of civil rights at the Agriculture Department is ![]()
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