Million Black Families have been Ripped from their Farms...

[5fish]

Here is another example of White racism cheating Black Americans of their land. Yes, the 20th century has god offal stories of White America cheating Black America of wealth... Mississippi Delta...

One Million Black Families in the South Have Lost Their Farms Over The Past Century

eji.org

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Black landowners in the South have lost 12 million acres of farmland over the past century—mostly from the 1950s onward. The Atlantic reports that a million Black families have been ripped from their farms in a “war waged by deed of title” and propelled by white racism and local white power.

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Starting with New Deal agencies in 1937, federal agencies whose “white administrators often ignored or targeted poor Black people—denying them loans and giving sharecropping work to white people” became “the safety net, price-setter, chief investor, and sole regulator for most of the farm economy in places like the Delta.” As small farms failed, large plantations grew into huge industrial mega-farms with enormous power over agricultural policy.

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Today, the vast majority of Black farmland in America is owned by white people or corporations. From a million Black farmers in 1914, there were 18,000 in 1992. “The dispossession of Black agricultural land resulted in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of Black wealth. We must emphasize this estimate is conservative … Depending on multiplier effects, rates of returns, and other factors, it could reach into the trillions,” researchers told The Atlantic. The large wealth gap between white and Black families today exists in part because of this historic loss.

 

[5fish]

Here is another way they lost their lands lack of lawyers...

African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land Over the Last Century

An obscure legal loophole is often to blame.

www.thenation.com

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In the 45 years following the Civil War, freed
 slaves and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land across the United States, most of it in the South. Land ownership meant stability and opportunity for black families, a shot at upward mobility and economic security for future generations. The hard-won property was generally used for farming, the primary occupation of most Southern blacks in the early 20th century. By 1920, there were 925,000 black-owned farms, representing about 14 percent of all farms in the United States.

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Then, in the mid-1950s, development came to Hilton Head. Wealthy industrialists bought up hundreds of acres for recreational sites as highway and bridge construction made it easier for mainland residents to reach the islands. By the 1990s, the waterfront properties on Hilton Head had become highly desirable among wealthy whites seeking a vacation home.

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Beyond Hilton Head, all of South Carolina has experienced enormous demographic shifts in the past 50 years. African Americans comprised nearly half of the state’s farmers in 1950, but by 2012 represented just 7 percent. In Beaufort County, which includes Hilton Head and other coastal islands, the population is now 
77 percent white, compared with 57 percent black in 1950. This shift has created tension between “native islanders” and the newcomers, many of them white retirees from the North. And it was facilitated by the forced sale of thousands of acres of black-owned land. To this day, Mitchell says, South Carolina is the “ground zero” of African-American partition sales.

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[5fish]

I found this article that breaks down the ways the Black farmers lost their to legal shenanigans.... short read...

How Did African-American Farmers Lose 90 percent of Their Land? - Modern Farmer

Emancipated slaves never received their promised 40 acres and a mule after the Civil War. For this, and a mountain of other reasons, calls for reparations

modernfarmer.com

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A combination of obscure legal mechanisms and racist institutions enabled—and continues to enable—developers to weasel it away.

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Heirs Property
Whether due to distrust of the legal system or lack of access to legal resources, freed slaves and their descendants often lacked a will transferring ownership of their property when they died. This means the property became “heirs property”—ownership is split equally among all known descendants; over time, the property is further split among the descendants of the descendants, creating over the course of generations a quagmire of ownership among hundreds, even thousands, of heirs. To use heirs property as collateral on a mortgage, to subdivide it, to develop it—and any number of other things of a legally binding nature—is difficult without first identifying and tracking down every heir, and gaining consent from each one.

Partition Sales
The descendants of slaves are by no means the only people dealing with the intractable issues associated with heirs property, but they deal with it in disproportionate numbers, at least in southern states (an estimated 40 percent of black-owned land is heirs property). For many Americans, property ownership is an unequivocal key to building and maintaining wealth across generations. But compared to property owners in possession of a clear title, heir’s property owners face tremendous practical and financial barriers to deriving wealth from their land. Oddly, one of the few things heir’s owners can do without the consent of all the other owners is to sell their portion of the property. The problem is that if just one owner sells, real estate laws in many places provide the new non-hereditary owner with a variety of means to obtain the entire property, often at below market rates—a process commonly referred to as a partition sale.

Torrens Acts
Historically, many states had what’s called a Torrens Act, which were originally intended to simplify title registry. But in a strange legal idiosyncrasy, these laws also serve as loopholes that allow third parties to force families off their land through partition sales. This is because when one owner/family member sells, Torrens rules help to shield them from recourse by other owners/family members, who in some instances may not even be notified of the sale until they are served an eviction notice.

Tax Sales
In high-demand areas where land value has skyrocketed (much black-owned heirs property lies in tourist areas along the coasts of North and South Carolina), property taxes go up accordingly. But if your goal is to stay on your land, rather than flip it, and you’re on a fixed income, chances are you at some point you’ll be unable to afford your annual property taxes. The county then has the right to put the property on the auction block—a common way for developers to access land from families who don’t want to sell.

Progress?
Some states have repealed Torrens legislation, but it is still a common means of dispossession within southern US. There is also a movement afoot to reform regulations governing partition sales, with a law called the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which according to ProPublica has now been adopted in 14 states. Another small sign of progress is a measure in last years Farm Bill that allows owners of heirs property to apply for various USDA programs, such as loans and crop insurance, for the first time.

 

[5fish]

This is a newspaper article describing how land was lost from the black families point of view... it a condense from...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-02-mn-10514-story.html

 

[5fish]

Here is modern tale of Black farmers and chickens....

How a Top Chicken Company Cut Off Black Farmers, One by One

The Trump administration has weakened legal protections for farmers and eased off enforcing rules on powerful meat companies.

www.propublica.org

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After the complaints by the farmers, an investigator for the USDA, which is responsible for regulating the industry, looked into Koch Foods’ dealings with those farmers and found “evidence of unjust discrimination,” according to a 700-page case file obtained by ProPublica. The investigator concluded that Koch Foods violated a law governing meat companies’ business practices.

snip... I pointed this oligarchy issue in another thread...

The five largest chicken companies now make up 61% of the market, compared with 34% in the hands of the top four firms in 1986. As the biggest companies expanded their control, they raised farmers’ average pay by a mere 2.5 cents a pound from 1988 to 2016, while the wholesale price of chicken rose by 17.4 cents a pound, according to data from the USDA and the National Chicken Council.