16 Million Acres: The Largest Theft of Black Wealth You’ve Never Heard Of

Somewhere in the red clay counties of Mississippi, in the sandy loam of the Carolinas, in the black soil of Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana, there are fourteen million acres of land that once belonged to Black families and no longer do. This is not a metaphor. It is a deed record. It is a chain of title. It is the documented, measurable, county-by-county disappearance of the single largest accumulation of Black wealth in American history, and it happened not in the chaos of slavery or the violence of Reconstruction but in the quiet, legal, procedurally correct mechanisms of twentieth-century American property law — mechanisms that were designed, whether by intention or by the kind of indifference that produces the same results as intention, to separate Black families from the land they had earned with their own hands.

In 1910, at the peak of Black land ownership, approximately 218,000 Black farmers owned roughly 16 million acres of agricultural land across the American South. They were not sharecroppers. They were not tenants. They were owners, and the land they owned represented not just economic value but a particular kind of freedom — the freedom that comes from standing on ground that belongs to you, that cannot be taken by the whim of an employer or the prejudice of a landlord, that can be passed to your children and your children’s children as the foundation of a stability that no paycheck can provide.

By 2017, the number of Black farm operators had fallen to approximately 48,000, and Black-owned farmland had shrunk to fewer than 4.7 million acres — with independent estimates suggesting that the amount of land truly controlled by Black families is closer to 2 million acres. In a little over a century, Black America lost between 80 and 90 percent of its agricultural land. At current average farmland values of approximately $3,800 per acre, the 14 million lost acres represent roughly $53 billion in land value alone — before accounting for the agricultural income, the mineral rights, the timber value, and the development potential that the land would have generated over a century of ownership.

The Heirs’ Property Trap

The single most devastating mechanism of Black land loss is a legal structure that most Americans have never heard of: heirs’ property. When a landowner dies without a will — which, in the Jim Crow South, was the overwhelming norm for Black families who had no access to attorneys and no reason to trust the legal system — the land passes to all legal heirs as tenants in common. This means that every descendant of the original owner holds an undivided fractional interest in the entire property. After two or three generations, a single farm might have dozens or even hundreds of co-owners, most of whom have never met each other, many of whom have moved away, and none of whom holds clear individual title.

This would be merely inconvenient if the law did not contain a lethal provision: any single co-owner, no matter how small their fractional interest, can petition a court for a partition sale — a forced auction of the entire property. The court does not consider whether the other owners want to sell. It does not consider whether the family has lived on the land for a century. It does not consider the sentimental, cultural, or historical value of the property. It simply orders the land sold to the highest bidder, and in rural Southern counties, the highest bidder is almost never a member of the family that has been living on it.

The partition sale process has been weaponized against Black families for decades. Speculators — often operating through shell companies and sometimes with the cooperation of local officials — identify heirs’ property tracts, locate a single heir willing to sell their fractional interest (often a distant relative who has no connection to the land), purchase that interest for a nominal sum, and then immediately petition the court for a partition sale. The family that has lived on the land for generations receives notice that their home is being auctioned. They cannot stop it. They cannot outbid the speculator, who has access to capital they do not. And the court, applying the law as written, orders the sale.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin

The USDA has estimated that heirs’ property affects an estimated 3.5 million acres across the South, with a combined value exceeding $28 billion. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which has been fighting Black land loss since 1967, estimates that partition sales account for the largest single category of involuntary Black land transfers in the twentieth century. This is not ancient history. It is happening today, in courthouses across the rural South, to families that have held their land since Reconstruction.

The USDA’s Documented Discrimination

If heirs’ property is the legal weapon, the United States Department of Agriculture is the institution that loaded it. For decades, the USDA — the agency charged with supporting American farmers — systematically discriminated against Black farmers in the administration of farm loans, disaster payments, and technical assistance programs. This discrimination was not incidental or the product of a few bad actors. It was institutional, pervasive, and documented by the USDA’s own Office of Inspector General.

Black farmers who applied for operating loans were denied at rates dramatically higher than white farmers with comparable credit profiles. When loans were approved, they were smaller, carried higher interest rates, and were processed so slowly that the planting season had often passed before the money arrived. Disaster assistance that was supposed to help all farmers recover from floods, droughts, and crop failures was routinely denied to Black applicants or approved in amounts that covered only a fraction of their losses. USDA county committees, which administered these programs at the local level, were overwhelmingly white and made decisions with virtually no oversight or accountability.

The consequences were predictable and devastating. Without operating capital, Black farmers could not plant. Without disaster assistance, they could not recover. Without technical support, they could not modernize. Year by year, farm by farm, the USDA’s discrimination squeezed Black farmers off the land as surely as if it had been done by force. The farms were not seized. They were starved — denied the oxygen of credit and support that every farm in America requires to survive — and when they failed, as farms denied oxygen inevitably do, the land was purchased at distressed prices by the neighbors, the speculators, and the corporations that had been waiting.

Pigford: Justice Deferred and Denied

In 1997, Timothy Pigford and four hundred other Black farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against the USDA, alleging a pattern of racial discrimination in farm lending that stretched back decades. The case, Pigford v. Glickman, resulted in the largest civil rights settlement in American history at the time: $1.06 billion to compensate Black farmers who had been discriminated against between 1981 and 1996. A subsequent settlement, Pigford II, added another $1.25 billion for late claimants.

The settlement sounds like justice. It was not. The average payment to a Track A claimant — the simplified process chosen by the vast majority of farmers — was $50,000 plus tax relief. Fifty thousand dollars for decades of discrimination that cost families their farms, their livelihoods, and their generational wealth. A farm that was worth $200,000 in 1985, and would be worth over a million today, was compensated with a check that would not cover a year’s operating expenses. The settlement acknowledged the harm. It did not repair it. And the land that was lost during those decades of discrimination has never been returned.

Moreover, the claims process itself was marked by the same bureaucratic indifference that had characterized the original discrimination. Thousands of Black farmers submitted claims that were denied on procedural grounds. Others were unaware that the settlement existed until the filing deadline had passed. The Government Accountability Office found significant irregularities in the adjudication process, including inconsistent standards for evaluating evidence and inadequate communication with claimants. For many families, Pigford was not the end of injustice but its continuation in a different form.

Tax Liens and the Quiet Seizure

Beyond heirs’ property and USDA discrimination, a third mechanism has driven Black land loss with ruthless efficiency: tax lien sales. When property taxes go unpaid, the county can sell the tax lien to a private investor, who pays the back taxes and then has the right to foreclose on the property if the owner does not repay within a specified redemption period. In theory, this system is race-neutral. In practice, it has functioned as a targeted extraction tool in Black communities.

Black rural landowners, particularly elderly landowners on fixed incomes, are disproportionately likely to fall behind on property taxes. The amounts are often small — a few hundred dollars, sometimes less. But the consequences are total. A tax lien investor who pays $300 in back taxes can acquire a property worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if the owner fails to redeem within the statutory period. In many Southern counties, the redemption notice is published in a legal newspaper that the property owner has never read, delivered to an address the property owner has not lived at in years, or simply not delivered at all.

The Associated Press, in its Pulitzer Prize-nominated series “Torn from the Land,” documented case after case of Black families who lost property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over tax debts of a few hundred. In one case in North Carolina, a family lost 66 acres of land — land that had been in the family since 1874 — over a $1,100 tax debt. The property was worth an estimated $1.3 million. The family received nothing.

What the Land Would Be Worth Today

The arithmetic of what was lost is staggering in its simplicity. Fourteen million acres of agricultural land, at the 2024 national average farmland value of approximately $3,800 per acre, equals $53.2 billion in raw land value. But farmland is not a static asset. It appreciates. It generates income. It provides collateral for loans that fund businesses, education, and further land acquisition. If Black families had retained their 16 million acres and the land had appreciated at the historical average rate for Southern farmland — roughly 5.5% annually over the past century — the compounded value would approach estimates in the trillions. This single category of wealth loss may exceed the total current net worth of Black America.

These are not hypothetical numbers. They represent real families, real farms, real deeds that once bore Black names and no longer do. They represent the inheritance that was not passed down, the collateral that was not available for a business loan, the equity that was not used to fund a college education, the stability that was not there when a medical bill arrived or a job was lost. Every conversation about the racial wealth gap that does not begin with the loss of 14 million acres of Black-owned land is a conversation that has started in the wrong place.

The Reforms That Can Still Save What Remains

The most important legislative development in Black land retention in half a century is the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), a model law drafted by the Uniform Law Commission in 2010 and championed by Thomas Mitchell, the property law professor whose scholarship on partition sales has transformed the field. The UPHPA does not eliminate partition sales. It reforms them by requiring courts to consider the historical, cultural, and sentimental value of the property; by giving co-owners the right of first refusal to buy out the petitioning co-owner at fair market value; and by requiring a court-ordered appraisal rather than a forced auction, which historically produced sale prices far below market value.

As of 2024, twenty-two states have adopted the UPHPA, including most of the Southern states where Black land loss has been most severe. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has reported that in states where the UPHPA has been enacted, involuntary partition sales of Black-owned land have declined significantly. The law works. But it only works if Black families know about it, and public awareness remains dangerously low.

Community land trusts offer another proven mechanism for protecting Black land. The New Communities Land Trust, founded in 1969 in southwest Georgia by civil rights leaders Charles and Shirley Sherrod, was the first community land trust in the United States. At its peak, it held nearly 6,000 acres, providing secure land tenure for Black farming families. Though the original trust lost its land due to a devastating drought and USDA loan denial — the Sherrods were among the Pigford claimants — the model has been replicated across the country. Community land trusts hold land collectively, making it immune to partition sales, tax lien seizures, and the individual financial crises that have historically been the precursors to Black land loss.

“The land was always there. It was ours. And it was taken not by armies but by laws, by papers, by the quiet machinery of a system that knew exactly what it was doing.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights leader and Mississippi farmer

The Black Family Land Trust, founded in 2004, works directly with families to clear title, create estate plans, and establish legal structures that protect against the mechanisms of land loss. Their model is straightforward: educate families about heirs’ property risks, help them write wills, assist with title consolidation, and create protective ownership structures — all for families who would otherwise have no access to the legal expertise that wealthy white families take for granted.

What Must Happen Now

The path to protecting the remaining Black-owned land and recovering some of what was lost requires action on three levels. First, every Black family that owns land — any land, anywhere — must have a will. This is not legal advice. It is survival. The absence of a will is the single greatest predictor of future land loss for Black families. A will costs a few hundred dollars to prepare. Its absence can cost a family everything. Organizations like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Black Family Land Trust provide free or low-cost estate planning for Black landowners. The resources exist. They must be used.

Second, the UPHPA must be adopted in every remaining state where it has not been enacted, and its provisions must be strengthened. The current version of the act is a significant improvement over the prior law, but it still allows partition sales under certain circumstances. The ultimate goal should be the elimination of forced partition sales entirely for owner-occupied heirs’ property, replacing them with mandatory buyout provisions that keep land in the family.

Third, and most ambitiously, the federal government must fund a comprehensive Black land recovery program. The Justice for Black Farmers Act, introduced in the Senate, would provide up to 160 acres of land to qualifying Black farmers, create a land grant program modeled on the original Homestead Act that excluded Black Americans, and fund technical assistance and operating loans. Whether this specific legislation passes or not, its framework represents the scale of response that the scale of the loss demands.

The land is still there. It has not disappeared. It has merely changed hands, from the families who cleared it and planted it and built on it to the investors and corporations and developers who purchased it at prices made possible by the very mechanisms that forced its sale. Fourteen million acres. An area larger than the state of West Virginia. The soil still holds the memory of the families that worked it, even if the deeds no longer bear their names. And the question that faces Black America now is not whether this loss can be undone — much of it cannot — but whether the two million acres that remain, and the legal tools that can protect them, will be enough to ensure that the next generation of Black families can stand on ground that belongs to them, as their great-grandparents once did, and as their grandchildren still could, if we act with the urgency this crisis demands.