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THE UPRISING MARCHES ON
The Racist Structures That Prevented Black Home Ownership Are Finally Being Exposed
For Black people, land ownership isn’t just about equity — it’s about freedom
This piece is part of The Uprising Marches On, a package on what’s next for the movement for Black lives.
“If God be for us, who can be against us?” Romans 8:31, subheading of The Freedman’s Torchlight
In the early 1800s in New York, political enfranchisement for freed Black people was directly determined by whether or not they owned land. While white men could vote no matter if they had any land, free Black men were required to own $250 worth of taxable property. Even in those parts of the country where free Black people — Black men, really — could more easily acquire land, they still faced the constant threat of violence and property destruction.
In American schools we learn a simplified history, one that enforces a strict dichotomy between the altruistic, abolitionist North and the racist, secessionist South. But New York’s economy was inextricably tied to that of the Southern states, from which upstate mills would receive raw cotton to process into textiles. Before its occupation in the collective imagination as a bastion of gentrification and facile liberalism, Brooklyn was once the slaveholding capital of New York State. The Dutch farmers of Kings County relied so heavily on slave labor to cultivate such provisions as rye, wheat, and corn that, by the early 1800s, the area had the highest proportion of slaves and slave owners in the North.
In the wake of a financial crisis in 1837, known as the Panic of 1837, wealthy landowners in Brooklyn, fearful of a land bubble that was set to collapse, quickly sold off their properties. That created an opening for a number of entrepreneurial freed Black men to purchase the now-discarded land. Following a period of intense land speculation, Black abolitionist Henry C. Thompson bought most…
