User:SocietySloth/New sandbox

Black Land Loss in the United States:

To go after the part about the Freedman's Bureau:

The Freedman's Bureau was supposed to divide the land among the freed slaves, but ultimately all of the land was given back to their original owners. Beyond that, if in the case a black person did receive some portion of land, they were still dependent on government aid and jobs provided by the white people to survive. This meant that they were not making enough to be able to maintain ownership of land.

Black Land loss' impact on the present:

Landownership is important because it is a type of wealth that people can establish and benefit from themselves but also pass down (if properly maintained) for generations. During slavery, Black people were denied ownership of themselves let alone land and after slavery ended laws were set in place to ensure that this remained the same. The large migration of Black workers from the South to the North after globalization and technological advancements replaced the need for a lot of manual labor, created such a large population of Black people in the North that people in power initiated redlining. Redlining made it so that black people were only allowed to living in certain areas (whether that was because Real Estate agents would only show them certain houses and refused to show houses out of a certain area or banks would deny Blacks the loans necessary to buy a house in certain areas) Since redlining limited Blacks to certain areas not only did overcrowding become an issue but because of this there were fewer options for owning land (let alone space enough to establish farms).

Being able to own land is one of the easier ways to establish wealth, but Black people were denied this option for so long that now it is one of the only forms of wealth they have.

(Add to the Post Civil War Section) For a period after the Civil War, Black ownership of land increased and was primarily used for farming. At one point Blacks had gained ownership over about 15 million acres, which meant that they were also in control of 14% of the farms located in the United States (that is 925,000 farms owned by Black people). This is drastically different from what can be seen in the 20th century where not only do Black people own far less land in general, but they now also only own 2% of the farms located in the US.

Causes of Land Loss: Denying freed slaves and their descendants' equal access to programs and other services because of their lack of ability to provide the proper paperwork was a common practice and one that tampered with their landownership abilities. This is an issue that comes up for landowners who are now responsible for land that they inherited because many freed slaves and their earlier descendants did not write wills that would correctly pass landownership down which meant that in a lot of cases the proper titles were not passed down.

Another issue this raises is that if the land is not explicitly passed down to a certain person or group of people, it goes to all of the next heirs and any one of those heirs has the ability to sell the land without informing the rest of the heirs.

Before families face this difficulty though it is important to note that newly freed slaves had a hard time being able to acquire land, to begin with. Part of this was because they lacked the necessary documents to prove their identity (eg. birth certificates). After being freed most slaves were given the same last names as their owners and after that they had to register for citizenship; however, documentation that proved citizenship was not the same as a birth certificate that could prove identity.

(To add to the 2000s):

In 2016, a study showed that Black people owned less than 1% of the rural land in the United States and the total value of all of that land together is only 14 billion dollars (which only sounds like a lot until you realize how much the land of the white counterparts is worth). On the other hand, the total land that the White portion of America's population owns 856 million acres which brings their land's joint worth to be no less than one trillion dollars.

As Black people losing their land remains prevalent, groups that are designed to combat this reality are doing what they can to help people maintain ownership of their land. One such group is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, who has a Land Assistance fund that can go to African American families who need it. While this group is willing to help any African American in need of help maintaining ownership of their land, they are Southern-based which means that a lot of their help goes to African American farmers (whose numbers of land ownership are also decreasing). For more information about their land fund go to http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com.