Land, Wealth, Liberation Item Set
Item Set
Title
Land, Wealth, Liberation Item Set
Items
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The Black-White Racial Wealth Gap
“When we consider this through a racial lens, we see that the median net worth of White households in the United States is $130,800, compared to $9,590 for Black households and $17,530 for Latinx households.8 In looking specifically at the Black-White racial wealth gap, Black households have about seven cents on the dollar relative to White households. A White household living near the poverty line typically has about $18,000 in wealth, while similarly situated Black households have a median wealth near zero or negative net worth. If the population is divided into income quintiles, the lowest 20 percent of White earners have a median net worth of about $18,000, far exceeding the median net worth of $7,600 of Black earners in the next highest income quintile, and coming close to the $22,000 median net worth of Black earners in the middle income quintile.” "Racial wealth inequalities in the United States today are a direct result of centuries of racialized, exploitative social and legal structures—policies that set the foundation for a skewed distribution of land, labor, political power, and resource ownership by race. These patterns continue today and are evident in Black-White racial disparities in net worth..." -
Entrepreneurship, economic conditions, and the great recession.
Entrepreneurs face liquidity constraints and a business owner's wealth is important in determining access to financial capital for starting a business. Home owners are more likely to start businesses. In the presence of liquidity constraints, the ability of owners to borrow against the value of their homes, such as home equity loans, may make it easier to finance new business ventures. Home equity and other forms of personal wealth are important for starting businesses because they can be invested directly in the business or used as collateral to obtain business loans. The substantial racial disparities in wealth found in the United States contribute greatly to why blacks and Latinos have low business creation rates and worse business outcomes. Women are less likely to become entrepreneurs. African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians are also less likely to start businesses, all else equal. -
Wealth Inequality in Black and White: Cultural and Structural Sources of the Racial Wealth Gap
Using data from the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, this research examines competing and complementary cultural and structural explanations of the sources of racial differences in wealth. "In contrast to the view that African Americans’ pathological behaviors as the major contributing factors to economic inequality, proponents of structural and unequal ownership opportunity explanations point to discriminatory practices and racialized policies in labor markets, housing markets, and credit markets as key sources of racial wealth disparities. Such discriminatory practices and policies have created generational consequences that continue to impact African Americans today (e.g., inherited poverty). Historically, whites have been more able than African Americans to secure wealth in the form of businesses, homes, and stocks because of governmental policies that favored whites. African Americans were, by and large, denied the opportunity to acquire and pass down accumulated wealth until the 1960s." -
Racial, ethnic and gender inequities in farmland ownership and farming in the U.S.
The author reviews the literature on landownership concluding that systematic exclusion of non-whites beginning with enclosure during the settler colonial period, continuing with the Homestead Acts, the New Deal era Farm bills and discriminatory lending practices by the USDA has resulted in monopolization of agricultural land in the US by white males, with no progress being made to the present day in land ownership by minorities. Although the authors state the data limitations explicitly, the findings are striking "White, non-Hispanic males comprise the vast majority of all landowners, owner-operators, and tenants. In terms of race, 97% of landowners, 96% of farm owner-operators, and 86% of tenants are White. Meanwhile, farmers that identify as African American/Black, Asian, Native American, or Pacific Islander/Hawaiian make up about 3% of non-operating landowners, 4% of owner-operators, and 14% of tenants. Farmers of color were least likely to be in the more land-secure groups of non-operating landowners or operator-owners, and more likely to be in more vulnerable position of leasing land (though their numbers as tenant farmers were well below their proportion overall in the U.S. population). Meanwhile, people of color comprised about 60% of farm laborers, a very vulnerable position in farming in the U.S., with notoriously difficult working conditions and low wages" during the period of the study 2012-2014. -
Persistence in inequality the racial wealth gap inextricably tied to homeownership
Rothstein shows how as property values appreciated blacks were disadvantaged in being unable to benefit from home equity appreciation having been deliberately excluded from home ownership by discriminatory federal labor market and income policies. Therefore, the rise in property values (e.g. a Levvittown house sold to whites in 1947 for $7,000 was worth $400,000.00 by 2014) ensured white capital accumulation, but by this time the majority of blacks could no longer afford to move into suburban neighborhoods. Using a new long-run dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, Kuhn, Schulerick & Steins report that “historical data … reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years, and that close to half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970”. Their report which was published by the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis demonstrated that housing booms lead to substantial wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality, all else equal. -
The Great Recession
The Great Recession devastated black wealth. This was because of two major factors: 1- the predatory lending practices that targeted black homeowners and also created the crisis which became known as the Great Recession 2-For blacks who were able to own homes the majority of their wealth was tied up in home equity (71% compared to 51% for white homeowners) which magnified the effect of the Great Recession among the African-American community. -
Reverse Redlining/Predatory Lending
In the 16-report series published by the Massachusetts Community & Banking Council Changing Patterns: Mortgage Lending to Traditionally Underserved Borrowers & Neighborhoods in the Boston, Greater Boston, and Massachusetts researcher Jim Campen shows how mortgage lending shifted from concern for fair access to credit for traditionally underserved borrowers and neighborhoods to concern for access to fair credit for these same borrowers and neighborhoods. The problem of redlining had become overshadowed by the problem of reverse redlining, also referred to as “predatory inclusion” whereby areas that previously had difficulty getting any mortgage loans at all became specifically targeted for higher-cost mortgage loans on exploitative terms beginning in the mid-1990s. Black and Latino borrowers were much more likely to receive HALs than were their white or Asian counterparts. When applicants were grouped into income categories, the denial rates for blacks and for Latinos were in every case well above the denial rates for white applicants in the same income category. After the subprime crisis of 2008, Campen found that the limited subprime lending that remained continued to show substantial racial and ethnic disparities. However, the original problem of fair access to good loans for traditionally underserved borrowers and neighborhoods was found to persist. Similar conclusions were drawn by Lauren E. Willis in her study of predatory lending where she states “many of those with subprime credit profiles are being charged much more than what their higher risk and cost should garner.... Moreover, the households paying these high prices and facing this high risk of foreclosure are disproportionately African American, Latino, and low- to moderate-income households that already have fewer financial resources to spare and significantly lower homeownership rates to begin with. The elderly have also been particularly hard hit. The targeting of minority and elderly communities for predatory loans has been dubbed "reverse redlining." ” Willis points to this as a national phenomenon, and she identifies deregulation, new capabilities in data gathering and processing by corporations, and large-scale securitization as drivers of the sub-prime loan market. In a 7-report series published by the Massachusetts Community & Banking Council Borrowing Trouble VII: Higher-Cost Mortgage Lending in Boston, Greater Boston, and Massachusetts researcher Jim Campen details how “Many (perhaps most) borrowers from subprime lenders pay more than they would have if they had obtained the best loan for which they were qualified. Sometimes this is because they could have qualified for a prime loan. More often, it is because they could have qualified for a lower-cost subprime loan than the one they received. Of particular concern is the fact that the likelihood of being overcharged for a mortgage loan is much greater for borrowers of color. ” “Subprime lending and race were tightly linked. A joint report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the US Department of the Treasury found that, as of 2000, “borrowers in black neighborhoods [were] five times as likely to refinance in the subprime market than borrowers in white neighborhoods,” even when controlling for income. Indeed, “Borrowers in upper-income black neighborhoods were twice as likely as homeowners in low-income white neighborhoods to refinance with a subprime loan.”” -
Massachusetts
Racial disparities in lending persist. A 1992 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston examined 4,500 mortgage-loan applications and discovered that black borrowers were twice as likely to get rejected for loans than white borrowers with similar credit histories. -
Black Market Firebombing, Bloomington, IN
The Indiana University Digital Exhibit “Student Demonstrations at IU in the 1960s” recounts the firebom “In the fall of 1968 IU graduate student Clarence “Rollo” Turner, in collaboration with other African-American students and faculty, opened a new store in Bloomington. Situated near campus on Kirkwood Avenue, The Black Market sold books, clothing, records, artwork and other crafts made in Africa or by African-Americans. … Soon after the store opened, Rollo Turner and other black students reported receiving threatening phone calls, and an editor of the Indiana Daily Student was visited by KKK members who were not happy about unfavorable press. Early in the morning of December 26, 1968 The Black Market was firebombed, destroying the entire store. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a white male throw a burning container through the window and driving away. There was little doubt that the crime was racially motivated, as The Black Market was the only business attacked. The incident also forced the city of Bloomington to recognize that violent racism was still very much alive in their part of Indiana, and could not be ignored. Two local men, both KKK members, were ultimately arrested, tried and found guilty of the firebombing. A third man, a Grand Dragon in the regional KKK, was arrested in the same sweep and was tried on weapons charges. Although various groups collected enough money to help Turner pay for the loss of goods in his store, the Black Market was never reopened.” -
Rural South
In the aftermath of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the US Department of Agriculture overtly and covertly pursues discriminatory policies and practices against poor farmers and black farmers. Chapter 1 documents the engineered shift from labor intensive farming to capital intensive chemically assisted farming, coupled with outright discrimination against African-American farmers, tenant farmers and sharecroppers. It discusses how favoring the agricultural elite and agri-business interests, US Government agricultural and tax policy, together with labor saving science and technology promulgated by land grant universities and experimentaion stations, conspired to push small farmers, tenants and sharecroppers out of farming and benefit large landowners, agribusiness and non farmers who got into farming to make a loss to write off against non farming income. While both white and African-American small farmers and sharecroppers were affected, African Americans were disproportionately affected by these policies, leaving farming and losing land at a significantly higher rate than white small farmers and sharecroppers. Chapter 2 describes the Civil War Era investigation into discrimination in local USDA programs, uncovering an infrastructure of corruption pitted against poor farmers black and white: favoritism in acreage allotments, lying to and withholding information from farmers and from Negro Extension Services workers about support programs, committee elections etc., discrimination in hiring and promotion, unequal pay, training and working conditions, and discriminatory denials of federal funding. It also documents outright theft from black farmers - see the case of Cozy Ellison. Committee positions, loans, and program participation went to wealthy white elite farm families, while African-American and poor white farmers were generally ignored "but African American farmers," the investigation found, were segregated and "consistently outside the decision-making process," because of serious and pervasive discrimination throughout state and county USDA agencies which were often misreported to or tacitly supported by federal officials in Washington, which in any event had disowned responsibility for the failures at the state and county level. -
Teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre (Greenwood, Oklahoma)
Introduction The Tulsa race massacre marked a definitive point in Black Americans’ perception of equality of treatment under the law. Rising violence from the late 1870s onward led to a growing sense of unease among Black Americans about equality of treatment under the law. After Tulsa African American inventors and other economic agents [concluded] that hate-related violence would likely not be adjudicated and that the rule of law, typically through federal government intervention, would likely not prevail. -
Allies in Bloomington, IN
Racial covenants were common in housing deeds in Bloomington and along with social pressure kept home ownership a primarily white venture according to WTIU news. The Indiana Public Media news report “Black History in Southern Indiana: Racially Restricitive Housing Covenants in Bloomington” recounts the struggles of two African American men facing discrimination finding housing. One man befriended a white lawyer before moving into the area who smoothed the way for him. The other, a Korean War veteran, who moved to Bloomington to work for Otis Elevator, after several frustrating incidents of discrimination, eventually received an offer from a Jehovah's Witness out preaching who was a builder and offered to build a house for him if he could find a lot to purchase - and this was the means by which he was able to own a home. -
Allies in Springfield, IL
Leroy Brown shares his memories of the night of the riot in an interview and memoir found in the Oral History Collection of the University of Illinois at Springfield. He lived at his employers' home, but they were out of town, and their son was fearful of the home being attacked if the mob knew that an African American was on the premises. He was taken in and hidden in the basement by a Mr. Leach, from Kentucky, who also gave him temporary work until his employers returned. --- -
Allies in Rosewood, FL
Rosewood was a striving, nearly all-black town near Florida’s Gulf Coast, which was destroyed by white vigilantes who attacked the black citizens of Rosewood in January 1923. The homes of all the black residents in Rosewood were destroyed, while the homes of two white families remained untouched. One of the families - John Wright and his wife, who operated a general store and had no children of their own protected black residents and their children from further violence and acted as liaisons to Black residents hiding in the swamps, providing them with food. Seven-year-old Lee Ruth Davis managed to get the Wright store. She is quoted as saying - "I was laying that deep in water, that is where we sat all day long. . . . We got down on our bellies and crawled. We tried to keep people from seeing us through the bushes . . . We were trying to get back to Mr. Wright's house. After we got all the way to his house, Mr. and Mrs. Wright were all the way out in the bushes hollering and calling us, and when we answered they were so glad." Two white train conductors on the local railroad, brothers John and William Bryce, who had come to know all the residents of Rosewood over the years, brought the train to Rosewood to evacuate the women and children who were staying at the Wright house. Then they drove the train slowly up the tracks, blowing its horn as a signal to those who were hiding in the woods. The Bryces refused to stop for men, however, fearing that white gangs in the area might attack the train. The survivors of the riot who escaped on the train were taken in by Gainesville's African American community. Davis recalled the kindness they survivors received in Gainesville - “We pulled into the Gainesville Seaboard Station. It was jammed packed. You know, everyone was hollering and crying, and saying that they put us on the train. So many sheets covered with blood around them and everything. So people started saying I am going to take five or six. To take them to their homes and give them a place to stay. . . . Gainesville really looked out for us.” -
Allies in Tulsa, OK
An African American resident of Greenwood, Richard Hill, who survived the Tulsa race massacre, and one of his friends, describes the ordeal. He talks about taking shelter at the Convention Hall. His friend Arthur Claus, a fellow congregation member and white man went to check on his home and was met by another white man holding a rifle who demanded to know why he was entering Mr. Hill's yard. This was a neighbor who was there protecting Hill's property. Assuring the neighbor that he was not a rioter, they jointly protected Mr. Hill's home from the mob. Later, Mr. Claus was able to get permission from the National Guard for Mr. Hill and his family to be released from the Convention Center, after which he took Mr. Hill and his family to his home for protection until the violence subsided. -
Africatown, Alabama (possible Indigenous names Bogue Chitto/Chikasabogue Creek)
Africatown, is the only town in the United States to be founded by Africans. Founded near Bogue Chitto (Choctaw:Big Creek), Africatown was the first town to be run continuously by black people. Upon Emancipation, survivors of the Clotilda - the vessel which brought the last slave cargo brought to the United States established the unincorporated town. Bogue Chitto was known for its fiercely self-sufficient residents. Land ownership gave residents a sense of fierce independence, which reportedly kept even the Klu Klux Klan away. Nearly every man in Bogue Chitto was a registered voter until the right to vote was taken away during Reconstruction. Well into the 20th century, Bogue Chitto was known for its civic spirit and support for the civil rights movement. It was the place of residence of Clotilda survivors Gumpa, Matilda McCrear, Sally Redoshi Smith, Oluale Kossola/Cujoe Lewis. Acclaimed anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist Zora Neale Hurston documented the lives of Kossola in her work "Barracoon". -
Sweet Water, Alabama
The state of Alabama sued Lemon Williams and Lawrence Hudson, contending the cousins had no right to two 40-acre farms their family had worked in Sweet Water, Ala., for nearly a century. The land, officials contended, belonged to the state. Circuit Judge Emmett F. Hildreth urged the state to drop its suit, declaring it would result in “a severe injustice.” But when the state refused, the judge ordered the family off the land. The state’s internal memos and letters on the case are peppered with references to the family’s race. In the same courthouse where the case was heard, Associated Press investigators located deeds and tax records documenting that the family had owned the land since an ancestor bought it on January 3, 1874. -
Woodlawn, Chicago
Sources detail how the University of Chicago maneuvered an amendment to the 1949 Federal Housing Act to extend the power of eminent domain to private institutions, to acquire South Campus, displacing (dispossession) the existing residents. A grassroots organization opposing this displacement negotiated for low-income housing. Forced into heavy concessions in the course of negotiations, TWO (The Woodlawn Organisation) got the university to agree to construct low-income housing on a strip at the edge of Woodlawn. However, demolition for South Campus took place before the housing was built forcing many to resettle in areas far away. The low cost housing eventually built has been plagued by deterioration and bankruptcy. -
Indiana Avenue Historic District - Indianapolis, IN
Indiana Avenue was the center of Black culture in Indianapolis. During the Jazz Era legends like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald played alongside locals like the Hampton Sisters and Wes Montgomery at the 30-plus clubs in the neighborhood. "The Avenue" was also home to the headquarters of Madam C. J. Walker’s majestic theater and hair care manufacturing company, prominent Black churches, Black newspapers, and Black-owned businesses. Urban renewal projects, particularly the expansion of Indiana University destroyed the neighborhood in the mid-20th century. Although the University Medical Center (the forerunner of today’s IUPUI campus) had bought surrounding property piecemeal since the 1920’s, and this continued well into the 1970s, in the 1950’s federal funding targeting so-called ‘urban-blight’ made rapid and aggressive acquisitions of surrounding neighborhoods possible, expanding the power of eminent domain, and destroying communities in the process. The present day IUPUI campus was home to a neighborhood that in the middle of the twentieth century was the center of African American life in central Indiana, including a business district, schools, churches, leisure spaces and homes of both affluent and impoverished families. In the 1950s two urban renewal projects directed by the Indianapolis Redevelopment Commission removed residents to sell their land to the university. The Commission purchased properties (104 homes in the first case and a neighborhood comprising 18 acres in the other), relocated residents, cleared the land, and sold it to the university. A January 1970 IUPUI memo demonstrates that the university was fully aware of the displacement of this community and the resulting ill-will stating that the projects “significantly reduced the area’s supply of low cost housing. … In fact, as social and commercial services disappear from the neighborhood tenants and home owners are asking if the City and the University are not making the area so barren that people are forced to move out rather than “die on the vine.” Institutions are behaving in ways which look like the same old obstacles which poor Black folk have experienced over past years. There is some local bitterness about the “paternalistic” approach common to organizations purporting to serve the neigborhood. The white or “giving” group usually selects the local leadership it will work with, and secondly the grou selects the services it thinks the neighborhood needs. People are no longer willing to appear grateful for things they never asked for. They are understandably upset … by massive change forces over which they feel they have little control.” -
Blackbottom neighborhood, Detroit, Michigan
In 1946 the city of Detroit began condemnation of the historic black neighborhood – Blackbottom, to make way for the Lafayette Park residential district and a freeway. Starting as a center of Eastern European Jewish settlement, by the 1930s the area was mostly black and mostly poor. Restrictive housing covenants prohibited black Americans from living in most other parts of the city. Notably, in 1925 a white mob attacked prominent black attorney Ossian Sweet when he moved into his new home in a white neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. Retaliating with gunfire a neighbor was shot. Ossian Sweet, his relatives and friends were tried for murder, first ending in a mistrial then acquitted and he was able to move back into his home. Most black Americans living in Detroit were not so fortunate. By the 1930s the area was hit hard during the Great Depression and during WWII decay rapidly increased as people poured into the city seeking work in the auto-factories and racial discrimination restricted black persons to the increasingly overcrowded Blackbottom area. Despite this, by the early 1950s they were able to transform Blackbottom into the center of African American life with black-owned business, social institutions and, in nearby Paradise Valley, nightclubs and entertainment. By 1954 the Blackbottom neighborhood was gone, and Paradise Valley followed a few years later. In 2021 a call for reparations was made locally by the Detroit City Council, given that many residents were given 30 days notice to vacate and minimal, if any, assistance was provided. -
Jackson Ward - Richmond, VA
Richmond at the turn of the 20th century had one of the nation’s most thriving Black business communities. The hub of this activity was Jackson Ward with its fraternal organizations, banks, insurance companies, and other institutions, all founded and run by Black Americans. The neighborhood developed before the Civil War and originally was populated primarily by citizens of German and Jewish descent but with a sizable free Black American population. After the war, Jackson Ward gradually became predominantly Black. Some scholars attribute this to white political forces only allowing blacks to live in a single voting district to dilute their political power. Urban renewal projects in the 1950s devastated Jackson Ward. City and state officials designed the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike (now part of I-95) to pass through Jackson Ward, bisecting the neighborhood and destroying historic structures. Later, desegregation and white flight saw blacks moving out of Jackson Ward. As buildings began to deteriorate, the area was further targeted for new development such as federal housing projects, and the City Coliseum that opened in 1970. -
Yazoo County, Mississippi
In Yazoo County, Mississippi, Norman Stephens and his twin brother Homer ran a trucking business that took cotton pickers to plantations. One day, a white farmer demanded that Stephens immediately deliver workers to his field; Stephens said that he had other commitments but he would drop them off later. The farmer got the sheriff, who locked them in a second-floor room at the county jail. The twins jumped out of a window and ran because they overheard the sheriff talking about where to hide their bodies. They packed their bags and took a bus to Ohio, and a year later, Stephens’ wife and five children joined them. They continued to pay the mortgage and property taxes on the house they’d bought in 1942, but didn’t dare to return for a decade. In the 1960s, they stopped paying, and lost the house. -
Amite County, Mississippi
The Rev. Isaac Simmons’ 141-acre farm in Amite County, Miss., was sold for nonpayment of taxes, property records show. (Tax records from that time show that payments were current when the land was taken.) The farm, for which his father had paid $302 in 1887, was bought by a white man for $180. Simmons hired a lawyer in February 1944 and filed suit to regain his land. On March 26, a group of whites paid Simmons a visit. The minister’s daughter, Laura Lee Houston, now 74, recently recalled her terror as she stood with her month-old baby in her arms and watched the men drag Simmons away. “I screamed and hollered so loud,” she said. “They came toward me and I ran down in the woods.” The whites then grabbed Simmons’ son, Eldridge, from his house and drove the two men to a lonely road. “Two of them kept beating me,” Eldridge Simmons later told the NAACP. “They kept telling me that my father and I were [acting too smart] for going to see a lawyer.” Simmons, who has since died, said his captors gave him 10 days to leave town and told his father to start running. Later that day, the minister’s body turned up with three gunshot wounds in the back, the McComb Enterprise newspaper reported at the time. Today, the Simmons land--thick with timber and used for hunting--is privately owned and is assessed at $33,660. (Officials assess property for tax purposes; the valuation is usually less than its market value.) -
Vero Beach, Florida
The Espy family in Vero Beach, Fla., lost its heritage in 1942, when the U.S. government seized its land through eminent domain to build an airfield. Government agencies frequently take land this way under rules that require fair compensation for the owners. In Vero Beach, however, the Navy appraised the Espys’ 147 acres, which included a 30-acre fruit grove, two houses and 40 house lots, at $8,000, according to court records. The Espys sued, and an all-white jury awarded them $13,000. That amounted to one-sixth of the price per acre that the Navy paid white neighbors for similar land with fewer improvements, records show. After World War II, the Navy gave the airfield to the city of Vero Beach. Ignoring the Espys’ plea to buy back their land, the city sold part of it, at $1,500 an acre, to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965 as a spring training facility. In 1999, the former Navy land, with parts of Dodgertown and a municipal airport, was assessed at $6.19 million. Sixty percent of that land once belonged to the Espys. The team sold its property to Indian River County for $10 million in August, according to Craig Callan, a Dodgers official.