This article explores the history and significance of Black Americans owning land and how it has shaped their identity and communities.
New book examines history of US land theft and why Black citizens’ futures should include restorative justice
America’s original super power is the land itself – a sprawling patchwork of green pastures, potable waterways and seasons that are never entirely overripe. It’s no wonder white colonizers grabbed as much of this prime real estate as they could, disregarding the prevailing masses who well knew, from centuries of subsisting off the land, that it ultimately belongs to no one.
After the purges of war and slavery, Black Americans emerged with about 15m acres (6m hectares) of land in their possession. The current holdings figure stands at about 2m acres, less than 0.5% of US land, and the grip is slipping fast. “From the very moment Europeans touch this soil,” explains author Brea Baker, “it was all about extraction.”
Baker’s debut tome, Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Ownership, plows deep into a devastating history that spans from settler colonialism to modern day redlining. Released on Juneteenth, the US federal holiday that honors the captive workers who were last to find out slavery in America had ended, Rooted is a deeply personal story, born from Baker’s years of writing on Black and queer culture and from her passionate activism on the social justice frontlines. An Atlantan by way of New York, Baker cherishes the opportunities to dirty her hands after avoiding them for years. A backyard chicken coop is one point of pride. She was driven to explore her southern roots after her paternal grandfather – a working-class engineer, who, like her, returned to the south after being raised up north – consolidated the family’s heirs’ properties into an eight-six acre estate: Bakers Acres.
This was no mean feat for a Black man in North Carolina, infamous for its violent practice of terrorizing Black communities into conditional citizenship. Many of those people descended from displaced indigenous communities like the Maroons – the Black freedmen who banded together to form their own societies as protection against recapture. Assimilation was not a survival option. In Rooted, Baker recalls how the Five Civilized Tribes entered into the slave trade to prevail on colonizers their value as partner-neighbors. Only too late, Baker writes, do they realize “that the only limit to American westward expansion would be the Pacific Ocean”. The line leaves you reconsidering whether a popular expression like “Give an inch, and they’ll take a mile” is literally innocuous.
By centering Black people in the story of the great American land grab, Rooted makes manifest destiny look like the lid on Pandora’s box; the book makes clear this unquenchable thirst for expansion runs from chattel slavery to the Industrial Revolution and still has the country licking its lips as it lurches into late-stage capitalism. “It required so much destruction,” Baker says of manifest destiny. “Killing Black people who could not bear the burden of the level of work. Killing the land, stripping it deeply and then denying all of the ancestral wisdom that both Black and indigenous people were bringing to the table.
“They would say, ‘We’ve got to do crop rotations. We’ve got to do controlled burns.’ But the answer was always, ‘We need more. We just have to try hard enough to make it happen faster.’”
Even as it teems with decades of policy and sociological research, Rooted unfolds like a yarn passed down through the generations. Baker pulls off the trick of remaining an authoritative narrator while holding onto the same sense of wonder that thickened the air during her formative trips down south. But it wasn’t easy getting relatives and others who’ve seen family land come and go, whether through domestic terrorism or the tax code, to open up. “A lot of our elders don’t want to talk about their relationship to land because it’s painful,” she says. “A lot of them grew up in a Jim Crow society where to be an imperfect Black person was to be a picked-off Black person. So you don’t admit to faults very easily, and you don’t linger on trauma long because what’s that gonna fix? Is it gonna bring the land back?”
To read Baker’s lush and lyric descriptions of land, lives and opportunities lost is to be reminded of the TV series Queen Sugar – the Ava DuVernay-created, Oprah Winfrey-produced cable drama about a trio of Black Louisiana siblings struggling to hold on to their 800-acre sugar farm in the wake of their father’s surprise death. “It’s so funny because my childhood best friend is Nick Ashe; he played Micah on the show,” says Baker, recalling Ashe’s astonished reaction to her early chapter drafts. “He was like, ‘I thought [the show scripts] were all just a lot of dramatization. But this is exactly how it happened – and is still going on.’”
Whereas in Queen Sugar, Black land owners mostly found themselves pitted against wealthier whites, in real life it was federal agencies like the US Department of Agriculture – which Abraham Lincoln established in the middle of the American civil war to safeguard the nation’s agrarian economy – that was the true antagonist. “The explicit violence comes in when the USDA’s research tells them farmers need all these chemicals, pesticides and super expensive machines that wind up putting most small farms, not just the Black ones, out of business.”
That, Baker argues, opened the door to industrial farming and paved the way for companies like Tyson – the chicken giant recently revealed to have dumped millions of pounds in toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes – to achieve farmland monopolies. What’s more, Rooted shows, the USDA was often the party helping these companies to swindle land out from under Black farmers in the name of the free market. “Most people when they think of federal agencies, it’s white ivory buildings in DC filled with people appointed by the president, who then lead policy,” Baker says. “But the USDA is a bunch of local offices in states across the country with officers that have carte blanche to implement and execute federal policy on a county level. So that means when the USDA says we have loans and we’re going to disseminate them, this one USDA county officer is who you go through. And it’s wild because the USDA, on their own website, has their own reports that confirm just how racist their county agents were.”
In the end, Rooted argues for the rural land activism of the south (quiet as it’s kept to prevent more terrorism) to be as recognized and respected as mainstream (read: northern) movements against systemic inequalities, while also making the case that land shouldn’t be left out of Black Americans’ reparation demands. (Not only did the federal government renege on the 40 acres and a mule Lincoln had promised to the emancipated, it repossessed the few land parcels that were officially granted to freed Black Americans and gave it to white southerners.) With every braggadocios social media post, Rick Ross, Waka Flocka and other Black celebrities drive home the idea that a person isn’t truly free in America until there’s a strip of land they can call their own.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 74% of Black Americans were in favor of reparations. But Baker argues that it’s whites – who are 74% against – who will need to be swayed for there to be any real chance of restorative justice.
“Book bans and attacks on critical race theory are only going to make that harder,” she says. “Because now you have to opt into a book like Rooted. You don’t get to have this conversation in a classroom. So for those who are seeing the book and are engaged, there’s now a responsibility to do more than just the bare minimum. You gotta talk to your nana about why she has a ranch in Montana that the Indigenous nations can’t access. You’ve got to wonder why Jackson Hole, Wyoming, doesn’t have any listings for under $1m, but Indigenous people can’t fish in the national parks there. These are real things that conservation groups and the well intentioned and wealthy white people have to take upon themselves to dig into.”
- Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Ownership is out now
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