Significant Dates on Black Land Loss and Land Acquisition
Timeline by Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund with additions from Teaching for Change
A timeline of significant dates.
The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms
Reading by Vann R. Newkirk II
A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. Through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.
African Americans Have Lost Untold Acres of Land Over the Last Century: An obscure legal loophole is often to blame
Reading by Leah Douglas
In the years following the Civil War, formerly enslaved people and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land, roughly 14 percent of all farms in the U.S. Today, African Americans compose less than 2 percent of the nation’s farmers and 1 percent of rural landowners.
African American Cooperatives Curriculum
Teaching Idea by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Throughout history, among all groups and people in every country, cooperatives have facilitated economic development, stabilization, and independence, often for those who have been economically marginalized. Learn about the long history of African American cooperative economic thought and practice.
Murals: Redefining Culture, Reclaiming Identity
Reading by Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez
A powerful essay on the connections among art, identity, and activism excerpted from the introduction to Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals.