The Stolen Land
Clem and I usually watch the NewsHour on PBS at 7 pm. Often there is one story that stands out for me. Last week it was about stolen land.
Vann Newkirk was interviewed about his article, The Great Land Robbery, in the September issue of The Atlantic. His subtitle tells a lot: “The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.”
Vann Newkirk spoke about stolen land in his article in The Atlantic.
Newkirk traveled in the Mississippi Delta with Willena Scott-White as his guide. She described the struggles her black family and so many others have faced to hold on to land.
Her story is exceptional in that she and her family own land today. But the story has been different for most black farm families.
A Long and Difficult History
Though Newkirk’s focus is on the theft of land from black Americans, he begins by saying, “The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it.”
Their ownership usually did not last. It was contested by white farmers and later government agents who used “legal and illegal means to force them to give up their land.”
He explains what happened more recently, citing the federal government, beginning with Roosevelt’s farm support program in 1937. Like other New Deal programs, Newkirk says, “white administrators often ignored or targeted poor black people—denying them loans and giving sharecropping work to white people.”
The USDA’s loan program exerted pressures that transferred wealth from black to white farmers in the 1950s. “In 1965, the United States Commission on Civil Rights uncovered blatant and dramatic racial differences in the level of federal investment in farmers,” Newkirk says.
“Black-owned cotton farms in the South almost completely disappeared, diminishing from 87,000 to just over 3,000 in the 1960s alone,” Newkirk says.
It is common for farmers to get loans to cover their costs until harvest when they repay. In the late 1970s Willena-Scott’s father was refused a loan, after securing one successfully the year before when he had been accompanied to the Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA, office by a white man.
In those years, the FmHA encouraged farmers to turn to catfish, providing loans and leading Mississippi to become the catfish capital of the world. The agency did not contact Scott. However he began catfish farming on his own. Several years later, his venture failed when he received no government aid or loans.
Yet there has been some justice for Willena Scott-White and her family. “In the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit of 1997, thousands of black farmers and their families won settlements against the USDA for discrimination that had occurred between 1981 and the end of 1996; the outlays ultimately reached a total of $2 billion.”
How many other families have been unable to recover? And can the debt to those families ever be repaid?
Farm Ownership Today
Today hedge funds, pensions, and corporations own much of the agricultural land in the Delta. TIAA (formerly TIAA-CREF) say they support corporate responsibility and check on legal ownership of lands they purchase.
I came to know TIAA when I worked at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibity. They were a major player in shareholders’ rights and other issues around corporate responsibility.
TIAA says, as other buyers do, that they try to act justly. Yet with records not always available, and much of what happened still hidden by racial prejudice, they cannot often tell who the owners should be, or were.
Newkirk ends his article saying, “Politics aside, how can reparations truly address the lives ruined, the family histories lost, the connection to the land severed? In America, land has always had a significance that exceeds its economic value. For a people who were once chattel themselves, real property has carried an almost mystical import.”
A powerful and unsettling story, brilliantly conveyed. Thanks, PBS, for telling me about it.
Canadian-Nigerian Author Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia
Cheluchi is my husband’s cousin. We enjoyed spending time with her on our visit to Nigeria last Christmas. When you click on the info in the box above you can read about her book.
Her novel came out in Nigeria months ago but is not yet available in the US. I’m waiting for it.
I’ve written about her several times. She is a lawyer and powerful health advocate in Nigeria. At a conference in April she advised pastors and pastors in training on health law and ethics.
I think I had my knee in the way when I snapped this pic of Beth and me at the beach!
Family Visits
My sister Beth spent a week with us. She returned to her home in Cincinnati on Wednesday. We didn’t have enough great beach days for her, but she was able to come with me to pick up my new car – guess what it is?
She also had the excitement of watching when a very large branch fell from our neighbor’s tree onto our patio. We thought it was a whole tree until we looked up and saw where it had come off. It was huge!
Daughter Beth and her husband Kelvin with Sam. They came to see us and our visitors.
Our son Sam was here for two and a half weeks, and returned to Lagos yesterday, going home by way of Casablanca on Air Maroc. It was lovely having them both.
Preventing Violence Against Women
I wore an orange scarf to my meeting of our church’s Year Round Stewardship Committee today, but I forgot to tell the others why! I wonder if anyone knew?
It’s #OrangeDay, observed on the 25th day of each month to remind us that preventing violence against women is a universal effort!
