How the Government Helped White Americans Steal Black Farmland

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How the Government Helped White Americans Steal Black Farmland

There was once a thriving Black middle class based on farm ownership. But during the twentieth century, the USDA helped erase that source of wealth.

The office of civil rights at the Agriculture Department is located on the third floor of a building named after a white supremacist. The Jamie Whitten Building, named in 1994, honors a member of Congress who started his career by eliminating a federal agency because its studies encouraged “racial intermingling” and ended it by referring to Mike Espy, a Black member of Congress and future secretary of agriculture, as “boy.” Whitten’s prejudices were reflected in the policies he supported: floods of cash for wealthy white farmers and next to nothing for Black farmers.

The representative from Mississippi never worked for USDA, but as chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture for over four decades, he exercised so much control over the department’s budget that he became known as the “Permanent Secretary of Agriculture.”

In a “typical year” in the 1960s, writes historian James Cobb in The Most Southern Place on Earth, Whitten secured $23.5 million for wealthy farmers who made up 0.3 percent of his district—and just $4 million in food stamps for the 59 percent of his district that lived below the poverty line. He once explained to Senator George McGovern that if “hunger was not a problem, [n-word]s won’t work.”

While Whitten was less abashed in his racism than many of his fellow lawmakers, they were no less committed to defending rich white farmers. From the start of Whitten’s political career to the present, lawmakers in both parties have set their differences aside to send the exceeding majority of federal funds to commercial farmers, almost all of them white men.

Black farmers not only lost out on these massive subsidies—they have been effectively disenfranchised within the modern agricultural system. Under conditions of savage oppression, Black families emerged in the early 1900s with almost 20 million acres of farmland and “the largest amount of property they would ever own within the United States,” according to the historian Manning Marable. Since then, they have lost roughly 90 percent of that acreage.

Despite the scale of this deliberate, state-sanctioned dispossession, no one has estimated how much Black families lost. For the first time, in a forthcoming paper to be published in the American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings journal, our team conducted a comprehensive analysis of historical data from 1920 to 1997 and found that the lost wealth and income from the land totals about $326 billion—roughly the size of Hong Kong’s annual gross domestic product. This enormous loss not only cost the families who saw their land and dreams taken from them, but destroyed a rural Black middle class that had, by sheer will, emerged in the aftermath of slavery. Since family wealth is iterative—growing slowly at first, adding to itself, and accumulating and expanding over time—this blow to a nascent Black middle class has reverberated down the generations.

What happened
The Civil War destroyed the basis of wealth in the Old South—slavery—and with it a system of social relations. In their struggle to create a new society, amid universal oppression and disadvantage, Black families acquired property at an astounding rate.

By 1890, about 20 percent of Black farm families owned their land, and by 1910 that figure had reached 25 percent. Even as white creditors cheated them, white planters worked them ragged, white politicians disenfranchised them, and white mobs targeted them with arsons and lynchings, over 425,000 Black families were able to save enough to purchase almost 20 million acres in the Jim Crow South. The number of people in these families roughly numbered the total African Americans who migrated north in the first Great Migration, and the acreage they owned approached the size of South Carolina.

This rural Black middle class was the hope of a generation. W.E.B. DuBois—who completed several extensive studies of Black farmers in the early twentieth century—numbered 200,000 farmers among 250,000 Black “independents” in America, so-named for their economic power. “Landowning farmers and entrepreneurs,” writes historian Debra Reid, “reorganized rural society by founding fraternal societies and building schools, churches, and businesses to cater to a black clientele.”

In his study of a rural county in Alabama, the sociologist Charles Johnson found that farm owners had larger, better quality homes; more equipment and livestock; kept their kids in school longer; grew more food for themselves; and had more magazine subscriptions than non-farm owners. Other writers found similar results in North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and elsewhere in the South.

Yet the federal government acted against these families. Hard-pressed as they were already, the modern agricultural system created as part of the New Deal was the single greatest cause of the decline of Black farmers. As Ira Katznelson makes clear in When Affirmative Action Was White, New Deal liberals needed Southern legislators to pass their agenda, which gave the South’s elite immense control over legislation. These elites were determined to maintain the South’s racial order and moved as a bloc to crush any program that threatened it.


How the Government Helped White Americans Steal Black Farmland

This is a very enlightening read and much longer and detailed than what I shared here. I know I don't have to tell y'all this systematic dismantling of us having our own is what they do and consistent across generations.
 
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