A totally dark cloud of endless suffering of brutality. From being bought as a Slave to the sugar Cain farms then cotton picking then finally became a land owner. I used these images to describe the Black Africans life state while in Slave Trade
If there were people like Black Africans who were also in Slave Trade, then their lives would be in the depths of hell itself like we did. But in the case of the white man , who was utterly vincible and calm, we find that his life from moment to moment was as [vast and serene.
A very cruel and unforgiving time. In this cruel society, where Black people worked to relieve their sufferings, while proclaiming the truth from the very depths of their lives out of genuine concern for liberation, less than 50 years after slavery ended, Black people were able to accumulate millions of acres of land.
Not to mention 100s of self abstaining towns that were destroyed and lands that were illegally confiscated as recently as 1997.
Imagine the change in trajectory if they were never forced to leave the south and were able to hold on to the land and towns.
In the year 1910 Black Americans owned about 15,000,000 acres of land, mostly, that’s equivalent to Black people owning the entire state of West Virginia.
But by 1997, black land ownership was decimated down to 1,100,000 million acres of land essentially the size of Rhode Island.
So the question is; What happened? Was it stolen? Who stole it? and Why was it stolen?
Over the 90 year period, white people developed multiple ways to take Black owned land.They use tools like tax laws, and Fraudulent contracts and the Torrens act. But they also used state sanctioned violence.Â
It’s not enough to frame these events as the actions of a few bad actors. Because those few bad actors were fully enabled by local-state and federal government officials.
They were allowed to go away with it and in some cases were encouraged by the federal government to take Black owned land through programs like Urban Renewal, according to study by the American Bar Association, a conservative estimate of the cumulative value of the land and property stolen from black people total somewhere around $326 Billion.
If that represented the GDP of a country, that country’s economy would rank 41st in the entire world ahead of Finland,New-Zealand and South Africa.
Bringing our history to light?
At its height, Black land ownership was impressive. At the turn of the 20th century, formerly enslaved Black people and their heirs owned 15 million acres of land, primarily in the South, mostly used for farming. In 1920, the 925,000 African-American farms represented 14 percent of the farms in America.
Sadly, things turned for the worse, as 600,000 Black farmers were forced off their land with only 45,000 Black farms remaining in 1975. Now, Black folks are only 1 percent of rural landowners in the U. S., and under 2 percent of farmers. Of the 1 billion acres of arable land in America, Black people today own a little more than 1 million acres, according to .
Over the years, Black people have lost their land through a number of circumstances, including government action, deception and a reign of domestic terror in the South that forced Black people from their homes through threats of violence and lynching. That terror and economic exploitation precipitated the Great Migration.
TSASI
How did you lose all that land?
Janellemonae
How we lost the land is an untold story. An investigation by AP documented the process by which people were tricked or intimated out of their property. In this study of 107 land takings in 13 Southern and border states, 406 landowners lost over 24,000 acres of farm and timber land and 85 properties such as city lots and stores. The property, which today is owned by white people and corporations, is valued in the tens of millions of dollars. In recent years groups such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta and the Land Loss Prevention Project in Durham, N. C. receive new reports of land takings on a regular basis while the Penn Center in St. Helena Island, S. C. has gathered 2,000 such cases. One story from the AP provides the context by which families lost their land to thievery and violence:
After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, KY, and ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker refused and shot at them instead, the mob poured coal oil on his house and set it afire.… Walker ran out the front door, followed by four screaming children and his wife, carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding three children and killing the others. Walker’s oldest son never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the farm their father died defending. Land records show that Walker’s 2 1/2 -acre farm was simply folded into the property of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another man, whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.
TSASI
“It’s more about land as a home, it’s about economics and culture, all rolled up into one,” Jennie L. Stephens, executive director of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation said. Based in Charleston, S. C. the organisation serves 15 counties in the Palmetto State. Including the Lowcountry, where Gullah-Geechee have struggled to hold onto their ancestral homelands on the Sea Islands in the face of development, gentrification and corporate intrusion. For generations, families have had the land procured through the blood sweat and tears of their ancestors, until many are forced to sell it.
Janellemonae
“If you can get people to maximize their potential through land, they don’t need a handout,” Jennie Stephens said, underscoring the importance of owning the land and building family wealth. “It is time for your child to go off to college.
Maybe you have had trees growing for a while. One person who has a clear title, they had the trees cut off their land and could send their children to college without student loans. That money was not a loss to their family, literally that wealth was passed to their family,” she added. “That’s a very simple example of wealth building, the fact that these children can come out of college without a student loan.
After many years of silence, Africans have opened their eyes on their wisdom. This is to show you the principle of the ; “unchanging”.
Dedication to the principle of eternal and unchanging truth” means accepting and committing to the ultimate truth that is, merging our lives. Thank you
