“Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi,” as Vann R. Newkirk II argues in his long form journalistic piece “The Great Land Robbery.” Through a detailed examination of the land history of one family, Newkirk opens up a host of systemic practices that worked to defraud African-American farmers out of their land and, more importantly, the modes of resilience that have allowed some farmers to continue farming. Nevertheless, between the end of World War 1 and the beginning of the 1990s, the number of Black farmers in Mississippi dropped from approximately 1 million down to just 18,000. Moreover, Newkirk writes, “Were it not for dispossession, Mississippi today might well be a majority-black state, with a radically different political destiny. Imagine the difference in our national politics if the center of gravity of black electoral strength had remained in the South after the Voting Rights Act was passed.”
The story of the extended Scott family is not just a Mississippi story or, indeed, necessarily even an African American story, although African American farmers have been most systematically defrauded of their lands in the American South during the 20th Century. Newkirk points out that some of the largest landowners in the Mississippi Delta today are pension funds and insurance companies, reflecting a consolidation of land in the possession of absentee owners that has taken place across the country. The pattern of large scale, absentee ownership of farmland marks some of the country’s most important agricultural areas, from the Midwest to California.
As a complement to the long form, detailed focus offered by Newkirk’s piece, this short article, from the History News Network,, traces the many ways African Americans have been deprived of legal and economic interests in land over the past 150 years. The piece, which cites heavily from journalism rather than scholarship, makes a compelling point that systemic deprivation of land interests is fundamental to issues of Black poverty currently. History News Network is a blog site published through the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at The George Washington University.
Finally, another longform journalism piece, this time in The New Yorker, details the pernicious system of “heirs’ property,” where descendants inherit a share in family land. Begun after the Civil War, when many African-Americans did not have access to the legal system, heirs property laws have been used to dispossess thousands of Black landowners across the American South. According to the article,
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. Nathan Rosenberg, a lawyer and a researcher in the group, told me, ‘If you want to understand wealth and inequality in this country, you have to understand black land loss.’”
What do these articles offer those who want to understand the nature and role of “land” in this country? For one thing, the meanings, ownership, and use of land should always be thought of as contested. These articles don’t even discuss the historical fact that, in all of these cases, Indigenous people had been fraudulently and violently stripped of their connections to the lands in question well before the circumstances discussed in the articles. Second, the study of land, or the more common academic and planning terms of land use and land cover, is never purely a technical or scientific question. Visionaries such as Ian McHarg, who devised systems of understanding the “suitability” of particular lands for particular development or conservation uses, still never quite got at the dimensions of care, love, and stewardship that make land more than just land.