https://thefern.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=0ba3f2fbf2ffd3ce787b33187&id=ea62e7a131&e=b773ac6203
The investigative story by Leah Douglas traces the loss of family farmland of African Americans - many descendants of freed slave - to doddy lawyers and unscrupulous white investors and land developers using a legal loophole of an obscure law on " heir property'. This law allowed the sale of ancestral land without seeking the permission of the land owners who in many cases stretched for generations and title was not documented in wills to prove ownership. Using public records on land holdings and ownership the journalist used the data to show how black americans had been dispossed. For example, in 1920 there were 925000 black landowners in the US mostly in the South and this fell to 45000 in 1975 and has declined in the last century to just 2 percent of the national land ownership to day. The writer identifies most of the characters after tracking descendants still on the farms and a revision of the law on heir properties eventually led to the pdotection of the land rights of the black american landowners. Today there is a steady rise in farmland ownership by black americans in the States.
