The following is an excerpt from Brea Baker’s “Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership.” Available for purchase now.
“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” This is how Toni Morrison introduces readers of “Sula” to the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, and the Black neighborhood there known as “the Bottom,” where one of the most archetypal examples of land theft takes place.
The story goes that a Black laborer was exploited by his White employer, who took the laborer’s backbreaking work in exchange for what was supposed to be fertile land. Instead, the laborer’s White boss gifted him land atop a hill that overlooked Medallion with a duplicitous promise that this parcel was some of the best land around. Over the next few years, the Bottom proved to be too hilly and vulnerable to erosion for planting. The Black people who came to call the Bottom home had no choice but to fight with the rocky terrain and make do.
First, you make the landowners White. Then you make America a country by and for landowners. With this codependency in place, White supremacy props up the hoarding of land and natural resources, and vice versa.
Morrison threads throughout the book the idea that, as she writes, “sometimes good looks like evil and evil looks like good.” The undesirable land that Black people were tricked onto became prime real estate for White suburban families. The beech and pear trees that offered shade to children, along with the buildings that lined the road, were all set to be razed as the hill land became suddenly valuable.
The underlying trend that shows up throughout “Sula” is the reality that whenever White people decide they don’t want land, they are able to manipulate Black people onto those scraps; and when White people decide they want land that Black people are on, they use the legal system to make those whims a reality.
Jordan Lake, west of downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, is a massive reservoir created in the early 1970s. On any given weekend, families drive out of their respective city centers and meet along the shores for camping, boating, swimming, and great fishing. The almost 14,000-acre reservoir, with the most breathtaking sunrises, once belonged to many Black farming families who fought valiantly but ultimately lacked the political capital to hold on to their land. Holding land and property in a community with others has been one of the most quintessential aspects of egalitarian societies, and yet most of the wealthiest nations in the world uphold individualism as a constitutional prerogative.
Historically in the United States, the complicity of the federal government and legal system as a whole in land theft began with the emphasis of states’ and property rights. The bicameral Congress we are still governed by was formed through the myth that “states” would lose representation if we organized federal representation by population. State governments are not people, yet our Senate, to this day, grants power to centuries-old border declarations, diminishing the voting power of citizens in more densely populated parts of the nation where people own less land. From the meeting of the first dual-branch Congress, and with each amendment added to the Constitution likening property to liberty, nails were beaten into the coffin of collectivist political economies. First, you make the landowners White. Then you make America a country by and for landowners. With this codependency in place, White supremacy props up the hoarding of land and natural resources, and vice versa.
As the wealth of this nation bloomed, the consolidation of power in White landowners’ hands was baked into the DNA of American property law and in legislation governing political participation. The Founding Fathers built a federal government where only property-owning White men could vote, and the land ownership prerequisite was retracted on a state-by-state basis. In states like Rhode Island, poor White men fought back against their political exclusion in what became known as the Dorr Rebellion. Still, it would be more than 15 years after the Dorr Rebellion before North Carolina became the last state to eliminate property restrictions to civic engagement.
But as abolitionists have always pointed out, systems of oppression evolve when not dismantled from the roots. Throughout the 20th century, White property owners became more and more powerful, and legal traps were set to ensnare Black farmers and landowners. One of the most frustrating aspects of the way legal systems have historically worked against Black landowners is how community-centered mindsets were actively threatened to ensure that wealthy Black people remained on islands of their own.
The more isolated, the easier to control. Black land ownership patterns pre-colonization were always more anti-capitalist in nature, in that extended families and tribes were known to own and cultivate land together. From maroon communities to family homesteads, Black collectivist economic and environmental independence stood in the way of White land grabbing.
In pursuit of the American dream, Black landowners who prioritized sustainability and heritage over profit were mostly eradicated through whitelashing, USDA discrimination, and a predatory legal system. From heirs’ property limitations to skyrocketing property taxes, the law made it difficult for Black people to avoid foreclosure and having their land turned over to White families and their businesses. Unpaid property taxes — no matter how negligible the amount — could be cause for one’s land to go up for auction.
Worse than vultures, developers wait for any slip up to pounce on vulnerable tracts of land. Even Black landowners who own their homes and acreage outright can be ensnared in unfair property tax burdens. Property taxes are calculated based on tax rates determined by district and assessed values that vary from owner to owner.
Wrongful property tax assessments nationally have resulted in disproportionately higher property taxes for the lowest-valued homes. In their 2022 report “The Assessment Gap: Racial Inequalities in Property Taxation,” Carlos Avenancio-León and Troup Howard found that Black property owners face an almost 13% assessment gap that results in lost liquid capital. Even worse, a missed payment here and there quickly snowballs into unpaid bills leading to property seizures, as many generations of Bakers learned firsthand.
As abolitionists have always pointed out, systems of oppression evolve when not dismantled from the roots.
In a country where land and its resources are commodities, the exclusion and expulsion of Black and Indigenous people from the land economy has been an act of financial warfare. Take the fact that Black Americans own less than 1% of U.S. farmland, or that Indigenous households have approximately eight cents of wealth for every White household’s dollar. It’s important that we remember and reiterate that racial wealth gaps are not accidental, nor to be blamed on an alleged lack of ambition or work ethic. Poor and/or racially marginalized people can’t outwork a centuries-long head start, and certainly not if our opponent continues to cheat.
Excerpted from ROOTED copyright © 2024 by Brea Baker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
