Black farming

New Republic – [There are] roughly 46,000 Black farmers in the United States today—just 1.4 percent of all American farmers, down from 14 percent in 1920 (Black farmers themselves contend that even the 1.4 percent figure is inflated). There are today just barely 30,000 Black-owned farms, mostly in the Deep South—with more than 11,000 Black farmers in Texas alone—covering roughly three million acres.

…The first great post-emancipation betrayal of Black Americans was, of course, over land. At the end of the Civil War, the federal government had its earliest chance—of what would later be many—to make a good-faith attempt at recompense for nearly 250 years of brutal chattel slavery by creating a Black landowning class. Instead, it restored the very white planter class that had waged war against the United States to preserve slavery. Thus, the famous promise of “40 acres and mule” to the formerly enslaved went unfulfilled. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman gave the order, and 400,000 confiscated coastal acres were given to freed families….

The famous promise of “40 acres and mule” to the formerly enslaved went unfulfilled. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman gave the order, but within a few months, President Andrew Johnson rescinded it and forced Black families off the land.

That remains this country’s most infamous Black land betrayal, but even that was hardly the first. The 1850 Donation Land Act offered parcels of Oregon Territory land to “every white settler,” but excluded Black people. The citizenship requirement for the 1862 Homestead Act—signed days after Congress created the USDA—implicitly excluded both free and enslaved Black folks, whom the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision had declared incapable of citizenship. An estimated 93 million living Americans descend from those original homesteaders. As sociologist Thomas Shapiro has argued, that means roughly one-quarter of the country’s current population “potentially traces its legacy of property ownership, upward mobility, economic stability, class status, and wealth directly to one national policy—a policy that in practice essentially excluded African Americans.”