Black Farm Families Are Losing Their Land. New State Laws Seek to Help.

An analysis of the steep decline in the number of Black farmers from 1940-1974 and chronicle of Black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

African Americans have lost millions of acres of farmland across the South during the last century. John Yang talks to Vann Newkirk of The Atlantic, which highlights the story in its September issue, about the origins of what Newkirk calls “the great land robbery.”

As reparations have become a subject of national debate, the issue of black land loss is receiving renewed attention. A group of economists and statisticians recently calculated that, since 1910, black families have been stripped of hundreds of billions of dollars because of lost land.

Although African-Americans had amassed 15 million acres of land in the South between 1865 and 1919, today 97% of those land assets have been lost. Enter the Black Family Land Trust, Inc., which works with black landowners and farmers to preserve their land assets.

This article points to the ways in which legal loopholes stripped millions of acres of land from black families and how a campaign to rewrite laws is gaining momentum.

Over the course of the 20th century, black Americans have lost approximately 12 million acres of land. This mass land dispossession—a war waged by deed of title, which has affected 98 percent of black farmers—can only be called theft, says Atlantic writer Vann R. Newkirk II.

Hilton Head is one of several formerly Black-owned islands, whose transformation came at a heavy, painful cost for decades—all thanks to a shady legal practice that has robbed millions of acres from Black Americans in multiple Southern states over the past century.

The story of substantial black land acquisitions prior to World War I and of steady land losses after the war needs to receive more attention in the pages of black history.

Black-American culture has been tied to the land and agriculture for over 300 years. Research conducted in the Black Belt Region of Alabama is used to examine the importance of land, particularly the multigenerational ownership of land, on current farm participation and landholdings.