Stealing your land

 Today in the U.S., 43.4 percent  of Black Americans are homeowners, compared with 72.1 percent of white people, 51.1 percent of the Latinx population.

Homeownership is the biggest contributor to wealth and wealth transfer between generations. History shows us that Black homeownership has been stifled at every turn. While redlining may be a well-known it is only a part of the story.

At the beginning of the 20th century, African Americans owned at least 14 million acres of land. By the 21st century, 90 percent of the land had been stolen from them. Now, African Americans only own 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres. Across a century, white farmers and landowners developed multiple ways to take African Americans’ land.

In Mississippi alone, the land stolen from 1950 to 1964 totaled up to 800,000 acres. A research team calculated the value of the stolen land in Mississippi to be $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today’s dollars. And these estimates of white wealth extraction from African Americans through land theft are just one state.

Black Land Theft and the Racial Wealth Divide - CounterPunch.org