[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 668-684]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shuster). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. 
Clyburn) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to offer a Special Order 
tonight in conjunction with the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. 
Clayton), who will be joining us very shortly, as well as some other 
members of the Congressional Black Caucus, to speak on an issue that we 
feel is very, very important to our constituents and to our great 
Nation.
  Mr. Speaker, reparations, the act or process of making amends, is a 
word that often evokes vociferous reactions from many citizens in our 
Nation. Ever since I have been in Congress, among the first bills 
introduced at the beginning of the term are bills calling for 
reparations for slavery.
  Although I have always supported legislation dealing with the 
establishment of a commission and various other efforts to examine the 
issue of reparations, I have not always supported other measures, many 
of which call for direct remuneration. There was always the question of 
who can be identified as deserving, and how do we determine how much 
they deserve.
  But the question of reparations in the traditional form aside, I 
believe very strongly that there is ample documentation of various 
forms of racial injustices that occurred very often under the color of 
law. Not only can we document the injustices in many of these 
instances, but we can also identify those who were the subject of the 
injustices; and the time is long since passed for our government to 
take up where we fell short in 1872 when this Congress rescinded ``40 
acres and a mule.''
  The Associated Press recently documented some of these injustices 
when it conducted an 18-month long investigation into black landowners 
who have illegally and sometimes legally had their land stolen from 
them. After interviewing 1,000 people and examining tens of thousands 
of public records, the Associated Press documented 107 land-takings in 
13 Southern and border States. In those cases, 406 black landowners 
lost more than 24,000 acres of farm and timberland, plus 85 smaller 
properties, including stores and city lots.
  This research was compiled in a three part series titled ``Torn From 
the Land,'' which detailed how blacks in America were cheated out of 
their land or driven from it through intimidation, violence, and even 
murder.
  Some had their land foreclosed for minor debts. Still others lost 
their land to tricky legal maneuvers, still being used today, called 
partitioning, in which savvy buyers can acquire an entire family's 
property if just one heir agrees to sell them one parcel, however 
small.
  Mr. Speaker, although I am going to submit the entire research by the 
Associated Press as part of my statement, I wish at this time to read 
an excerpt from one of those series:
  ``As a little girl, Doria Dee often asked about the man in the 
portrait hanging in her aunt's living room, her great-great 
grandfather. `It's too painful,' her elderly relatives would say, and 
they would look away.
  ``A few years ago, Johnson, now 40, went to look for answers in the 
rural town of Abbeville, South Carolina.
  ``She learned that in his day the man in the portrait, Anthony B. 
Crawford, was one of the most prosperous farmers in Abbeville County. 
That is until October 21, 1916, the day the 51-year-old farmer hauled a 
wagon load of cotton to town.
  ``Crawford `seems to have been the type of Negro who was most 
offensive to certain elements of the white people,' Mrs. J.B. Holman 
would say a few days later in a letter published by the Abbeville Press 
and Banner. `He was getting rich for a Negro, and he was insolent along 
with it.'
  ``Crawford's prosperity had made him a target.
  ```The success of blacks such as Crawford threatened the reign of 
white supremacy,' said Stewart E. Tolnay, a sociologist at the 
University of Washington and coauthor of a book on lynchings. `There 
were obvious limitations or ceilings that blacks weren't supposed to go 
beyond.'
  ``In the decades between the Civil War and the civil rights era, one 
of those limitations was owning land.
  ``Racial violence in America is a familiar story, but the importance 
of land as a motive for lynchings and white mob attacks on blacks has 
been widely overlooked, and the resulting land losses suffered by black 
families such as the Crawfords have gone largely unreported.
  ``The Associated Press documented 57 violent land takings, more than 
half of the 107 land takings in an 18-month investigation of black land 
lost in America. The other cases involved trickery and legal 
manipulations.
  ``Sometimes black landowners were attacked by whites who just wanted 
to drive them from their property. In other cases, the attackers wanted 
the land for themselves.
  ``For many decades, successful blacks `lived with the gnawing fear 
that white neighbors could at any time do something violent and take 
everything from them,' this, according to Loren Schweninger, a 
University of North Carolina expert on black land ownership.
  ``While waiting his turn at the gin that fall day in 1916, Crawford 
entered the mercantile store of W.D. Barksdale. Contemporary news 
accounts and the papers of then Governor Richard Manning detailed what 
followed:
  ``Barksdale offered Crawford 85 cents a pound for his cottonseed. 
Crawford replied that he had a better offer. Barksdale called him a 
liar. Crawford called the storekeeper a cheat. Three clerks grabbed ax 
handles, and backed Crawford into the street, where the

[[Page 669]]

sheriff appeared and arrested Crawford, for cursing a white man.
  ``Released on bail, Crawford was cornered by 50 whites who beat and 
knifed him. The sheriff carried him back to jail. A few hours later, 
the deputy gave the mob the keys to Crawford's cell.
  ``Sundown found them at a baseball field at the edge of town. There, 
they hanged Crawford from a solitary southern pine.
  ``No one was ever tried for the killing. In its aftermath, hundreds 
of blacks, including some of the Crawfords, fled Abbeville.
  ``Two whites were appointed executors of Crawford's estate, which 
included 427 acres of prime cotton land. One was Andrew J. Ferguson, 
cousin of two of the mob's ring leaders.
  ``Crawford's children inherited the land, but Ferguson liquidated 
much of the rest of Crawford's property, including his cotton, which 
went to Barksdale. Ferguson kept $5,438, more than half the proceeds, 
and gave Crawford's children just $200 each, according to estate 
papers.
  ``Crawford's family struggled to hold on to the land, but eventually 
lost it when they could not pay off a $2,000 balance on the bank loan. 
Although the farm was assessed at $20,000, a white man paid $504 for it 
at the foreclosure auction, according to land records.
  ```There's land taken away and there's murder,' said Johnson, of 
Alexandria, Virginia. `But the biggest crime was that our family was 
split up by this. My family got scattered into the night.'
  ``The former Crawford land provided timber to several owners before 
International Paper Corporation acquired the property last year. Jenny 
Boardman, a company spokeswoman, said International Paper was unaware 
of the land's history. When told about it, she said: 'The Crawford 
story is tragic. It causes you to think that there are facets of our 
history that need to be discussed and addressed.'''
  Mr. Speaker, I include the entire Associated Press series of articles 
entitled ``Torn From the Land'' for the Record.

                      [From the Associated Press]

  AP Documents Land Taken From Blacks Through Trickery, Violence and 
                                 Murder

                  (By Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay)

       For generations, black families passed down the tales in 
     uneasy whispers: ``They stole our land.''
       These were family secrets shared after the children fell 
     asleep, after neighbors turned down the lamps--old stories 
     locked in fear and shame.
       Some of those whispered bits of oral history, it turns out, 
     are true.
       In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press 
     documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated 
     out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, 
     violence and even murder.
       In some cases, government officials approved the land 
     takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest 
     occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated 
     today.
       Some of the land taken from black families has become a 
     country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi, a major-
     league baseball spring training facility in Florida.
       The United States has a long history of bitter, often 
     violent land disputes, from claim jumping in the gold fields 
     to range wars in the old West to broken treaties with 
     American Indians. Poor white landowners, too, were sometimes 
     treated unfairly, pressured to sell out at rock-bottom prices 
     by railroads and lumber and mining companies.
       The fate of black landowners has been an overlooked part of 
     this story.
       The AP--in an investigation that included interviews with 
     more than 1,000 people and the examination of tens of 
     thousands of public records in county courthouses and state 
     and federal archives--documented 107 land takings in 13 
     Southern and border states.
       In those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more than 
     24,000 acres of farm and timber land plus 85 smaller 
     properties, including stores and city lots. Today, virtually 
     all of this property, valued at tens of millions of dollars, 
     is owned by whites or by corporations.
       Properties taken from blacks were often small--a 40-acre 
     farm, a general store, a modest house. But the losses were 
     devastating to families struggling to overcome the legacy of 
     slavery. In the agrarian South, landownership was the ladder 
     to respect and prosperity--the means to building economic 
     security and passing wealth on to the next generation. When 
     black families lost their land, they lost all of this.
       ``When they steal your land, they steal your future,'' said 
     Stephanie Hagans, 40, of Atlanta, who has been researching 
     how her great-grandmother, Ablow Weddington Stewart, lost 35 
     acres in Mattews, N.C. A white lawyer foreclosed on Stewart 
     in 1942 after he refused to allow her to finish paying off a 
     $540 debt, witnesses told the AP.
       ``How different would our lives be,'' Hagans asked, ``if 
     we'd had the opportunities, the pride that land brings?
       No one knows how many black families have been unfairly 
     stripped of their land, but there are indications of 
     extensive loss.
       Besides the 107 cases the AP documented, reporters found 
     evidence of scores of other land takings that could not be 
     fully verified because of gaps or inconsistencies in the 
     public record. Thousands of additional reports of land 
     takings from black families remain uninvestigated.
       Two thousand have been collected in recent years by the 
     Penn Center on St. Helena Island, S.C., an educational 
     institution established for freed slaves during the Civil 
     War. The Land Loss Prevention Project, a group of lawyers in 
     Durham, N.C., who represent blacks in land disputes, said it 
     receives new reports daily. And Heather Gray of the 
     Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta said her 
     organization has ``file cabinets full of complaints.''
       AP's findings ``are just the tip of one of the biggest 
     crimes of this country's history,'' said Ray Winbush, 
     director of Fisk University's Institute of Race Relations.
       Some examples of land takings documented by the AP:
       After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men 
     surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and 
     ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker 
     refused and shot at them instead, the mob poured coal oil on 
     his house and set it afire, according to contemporary 
     newspaper accounts. Pleading for mercy, Walker ran out the 
     front door, followed by four screaming children and his wife, 
     carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding 
     three children and killing the others. Walker's oldest son 
     never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with 
     the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the 
     farm their father died defending. Land records show that 
     Walker's 2\1/2\-acre farm simply folded into the property of 
     a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another man, 
     whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.
       In the 1950s and 1960s, a Chevrolet dealer in Holmes 
     County, Miss., acquired hundreds of acres from black farmers 
     by foreclosing on small loans for farm equipment and pickup 
     trucks. Norman Weathersby, then the only dealer in the area, 
     required the farmers to put up their land as security for the 
     loans, county residents who dealt with him said. And the 
     equipment he sold them they said, often broke down shortly 
     thereafter. Weathersby's friend, William E. Strider, ran the 
     local Farmers Home Administration--the credit lifeline for 
     many Southern farmers. Area residents, including Erma 
     Russell, 81, said Strider, now dead, was often slow in 
     releasing farm operating loans to blacks. When cash-poor 
     farmers missed payments owed to Weathersby, he took their 
     land. The AP documented eight cases in which Weathersby 
     acquired black-owned farms this way. When he died in 1973, he 
     left more than 700 acres of this land to his family, 
     according to estate papers, deeds and court records.
       In 1964, the state of Alabama sued Lemon Williams and 
     Lawrence Hudson, claiming the cousins had no right to two 40-
     acre farms their family had worked in Sweet Water, Ala., for 
     nearly a century. The land, officials contended, belonged to 
     the state. Circuit Judge Emmett F. Hildreth urged the state 
     to drop its suit, declaring it would result in ``a severe 
     injustice.'' But when the state refused, saying it wanted 
     income from timber on the land, the judge ruled against the 
     family. Today, the land lies empty; the state recently opened 
     some of it to logging. The state's internal memos and letters 
     on the case are peppered with references to the family's 
     race.
       In the same courthouse where the case was heard, the AP 
     located deeds and tax records documenting that the family had 
     owned the land since ancestor bought the property on Jan. 3, 
     1874. Surviving records also show the family paid property 
     taxes on the farms from the mid-1950s until the land was 
     taken.
       AP reporters tracked the land cases by reviewing deeds, 
     mortgages, tax records, estate papers, court proceedings, 
     survey or maps, oil and gas leases, marriage records, census 
     listings, birth records, death certificates and Freedmen's 
     Bureau archives. Additional documents, including FBI files 
     and Farmers Home Administration records, were obtained 
     through the Freedom of Information Act.
       The AP interviewed black families that lost land, as well 
     as lawyers, title searchers, historians, appraisers, 
     genealogists, surveyors, land activists, and local, state and 
     federal officials.
       The AP also talked to current owners of the land, nearly 
     all of whom acquired the properties years after the land 
     takings occurred. Most said they knew little about the 
     history of their land. When told about it, most expressed 
     regret.
       Weathersby's son, John, 62, who now runs the dealership in 
     Indianola, Miss., said he had little direct knowledge about 
     his father's

[[Page 670]]

     business affairs. However, he said he was sure his father 
     never would have sold defective vehicles and that he always 
     treated people fairly.
       Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman examined the state's files on 
     the Sweet Water case after an inquiry from the AP. He said he 
     found them ``disturbing'' and has asked the state attorney 
     general to review the matter.
       ``What I have asked the attorney general to do,'' he said, 
     ``is look not only at the letter of the law but at what is 
     fair and right.''
       The land takings are part of a larger picture--a 91-year 
     decline in black landownership in America.
       In 1910, black Americans owned more farmland than at any 
     time before or since--at least 15 million acres. Nearly all 
     of it was in the South, largely in Mississippi, Alabama and 
     the Carolinas, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. 
     Today, blacks won only 1.1 million of the country's more than 
     1 billion acres of arable land. They are part owners of 
     another 1.07 million acres.
       The number of white farmers has declined over the last 
     century, too, as economic trends have concentrated land in 
     fewer, often corporate, hands. However, black ownership has 
     declined 2\1/2\ times faster than white ownership, the U.S. 
     Civil Rights Commission noted in a 1982 report, the last 
     comprehensive federal study on the trend.
       The decline in black landownership had a number of causes, 
     including the discriminatory lending practices of the Farmers 
     Home Administration and the migration of blacks from the 
     rural South to industrial centers in the North and West.
       However, the land takings also contributed. In the decades 
     between Reconstruction and the civil rights struggle, black 
     families were powerless to prevent them, said Stuart E. 
     Tolnay, a University of Washington sociologist and co-author 
     of a book on lynchings. In an era when black Americans could 
     not drink from the same water fountains as whites and black 
     men were lynched for whistling at white women, few blacks 
     dared to challenge whites. Those who did could rarely find 
     lawyers to take their cases or judges who would give them a 
     fair hearing.
       The Rev. Isaac Simmons was an exception. When his land was 
     taken, he found a lawyer and tried to fight back.
       In 1942, his 141-acre farm in Amite County, Miss., was sold 
     for nonpayment of taxes, property records show. The farm, for 
     which his father had paid $302 in 1887, was brought by a 
     white man for $180.
       Only partial, tattered tax records for the period exist 
     today in the county courthouse; but they are enough to show 
     that tax payments on at least part of the property were 
     current when the land was taken.
       Simmons hired a lawyer in February 1944 and filed suit to 
     get his land back. On March 26, a group of whites paid 
     Simmons a visit.
       The minister's daughter, Laura Lee Houston, now 74, 
     recently recalled her terror as she stood with her month-old 
     baby in her arms and watched the man drag Simmons away. ``I 
     screamed and hollered so loud,'' she said. ``They came toward 
     me and I ran down in the woods.''
       The whites then grabbed Simmons' son, Eldridge, from his 
     house and drove the two men to a lonely road.
       ``Two of them kept beating me,'' Eldridge Simmons later 
     told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
     People. ``They kept telling me that my father and I were 
     `smart niggers' for going to see a lawyer.''
       Simmons, who has since died, said his captors gave him 10 
     days to leave town and told his father to start running. 
     Later that day, the minister's body turned up with three 
     gunshot wounds in the back, The McComb Enterprise newspaper 
     reported at the time.
       Today, the Simmons land--thick with timber and used for 
     hunting--is privately owned and is assessed at $33,660. 
     (Officials assess property for tax purposes, and the 
     valuation is usually less than its market value.)
       Over the past 20 years, a handful of black families have 
     sued to regain their ancestral lands. State courts, however, 
     have dismissed their cases on grounds that statutes of 
     limitations had expired.
       A group of attorneys led by Harvard University law 
     professor Charles J. Ogletree has been making inquiries 
     recently about land takings. The group has announced its 
     intention to file a national class-action lawsuit in pursuit 
     of reparations for slavery and racial discrimination. 
     However, some legal experts say redress for many land takings 
     may not be possible unless laws are changed.
       As the acres slipped away, so did treasured pieces of 
     family history--cabins crafted by a grandfather's hand, 
     family graves in shared groves.
       But ``the home place'' meant more than just that. Many 
     blacks have found it ``very difficult to transfer wealth from 
     one generation to the next,'' because they had trouble 
     holding onto land, said Paula Giddings, a history professor 
     at Duke University.
       The Espy family in Vero Beach, Fla., lost its heritage in 
     1942, when the U.S. government sized its land through eminent 
     domain to build an airfield. Government agencies frequently 
     take land this way for public purposes under rules that 
     require fair compensation for the owners.
       In Vero Beach, however, the Navy appraised the Espy's 147 
     acres, which included a 30-acre fruit grove, two houses and 
     40 house lots, at $8,000, according to court records. The 
     Espys sued, and an all-white jury awarded them $13,000. That 
     amounted to one-sixth of the price per acre that the Navy 
     paid white neighbors for similar land with fewer 
     improvements, records show.
       After World War II, the Navy gave the airfield to the city 
     of Vero Beach. Ignoring the Espy's plea to buy back their 
     land, the city sold part of it, at $1,500 an acre, to the Los 
     Angeles Dodgers in 1965 as a spring training facility.
       In 1999, the former Navy land, with parts of Dodgertown and 
     a municipal airport, was assessed at $6.19 million. Sixty 
     percent of that land once belonged to the Espys. The team 
     sold its property to Indian River County for $10 million in 
     August, according to Craig Callan, a Dodgers official.
       The true extent of land takings from black families will 
     never be known because of gaps in property and tax records in 
     many rural Southern counties. The AP found crumbling tax 
     records, deed books with names torn from them, file folders 
     with documents missing, and records that had been crudely 
     altered.
       In Jackson Parish, La., 40 years of moldy, gnawed tax and 
     mortgage records were piled in a cellar behind a roll of 
     Christmas lights and a wooden reindeer. In Yazoo County, 
     Miss., volumes of tax and deed records filled a classroom in 
     an abandoned school, the papers coated with white dust from a 
     falling ceiling. The AP retrieved dozens of documents that 
     custodians said were earmarked for shredders or landfills.
       The AP also found that about a third of the county 
     courthouses in Southern and border states have burned--some 
     more than once--since the Civil War. Some of the fires were 
     deliberately set.
       On the night of Sept. 10, 1932, for example, 15 whites 
     torched the courthouse in Paulding, Miss., where property 
     records for the eastern half of Jasper County, then 
     predominately black, were stored. Records for the 
     predominantly white western half of the county were safe in 
     another courthouse miles away.
       The door to the Paulding courthouse's safe, which protected 
     the records, had been locked the night before, the Jasper 
     County News reported at the time. The next morning, the safe 
     was found open, most of the records reduced to ashes.
       Suddenly, it was unclear who owned a big piece of eastern 
     Jasper County.
       Even before the courthouse fire, landownership in Jasper 
     County was contentious. According to historical accounts, the 
     Ku Klux Klan, resentful that blacks were buying and profiting 
     from land, had been attacking black-owned farms, burning 
     houses, lynching black farmers and chasing black landowners 
     away.
       The Masonite Corp., a wood products company, was one of the 
     largest landowners in the area. Because most of the land 
     records had been destroyed, the company went to court in 
     December 1937 to clear its title. Masonite believed it owned 
     9,581 acres and said in court papers that it had been unable 
     to locate anyone with a rival claim to the land.
       A month later, the court rules the company had clear title 
     to the land, which has since yielded millions of dollars in 
     natural gas, timber and oil, according to state records.
       From the few property records that remain, the AP was able 
     to document that at least 204.5 of those acres had been 
     acquired by Masonite after black owners were driven off by 
     the Klan. At least 850,000 barrels of oil have been pumped 
     from this property, according to state oil and gas board 
     records and figures from the Petroleum Technology Transfer 
     Council, an industry group.
       Today, the land is owned by International Paper Corp., 
     which acquired Masonite in 1988. Jenny Boardman, a company 
     spokeswoman, said International Paper has been unaware of the 
     ``tragic'' history of the land and was concerned about AP's 
     findings.
       ``This is probably part of a much larger, public debate 
     about whether there should be restitution for people who have 
     been harmed in the past,'' she said. ``And by virtue of the 
     fact that we now own these lands, we should be part of that 
     discussion.''
       Even when Southern courthouses remained standing, mistrust 
     and fear of white authority long kept blacks away from record 
     rooms, where documents often were segregated into ``white'' 
     and ``colored.'' Many elderly blacks say they still remember 
     how they were snubbed by court clerks, spat upon and even 
     struck.
       Today, however, fear and shame have given way to pride. 
     Interest in genealogy among black families is surging, and 
     some black Americans are unearthing the documents behind 
     those whispered stories.
       ``People are out there wondering: What ever happened to 
     Grandma's land?'' said Loretta Carter Hanes, 75, a retired 
     genealogist. ``They knew that their grandparents shed a lot 
     of blood and tears to get it.''
       Bryan Logan, a 55-year-old sports writer from Washington, 
     D.C., was researching his heritage when he uncovered a 
     connection to 264 acres of riverfront property in Richmond, 
     Va.
       Today, the land is Willow Oaks, an almost exclusively white 
     country club with an assessed value of $2.94 million. But in 
     the 1850s,

[[Page 671]]

     it was a corn-and-wheat plantation worked by the Howlett 
     slaves--Logan's ancestors.
       Their owner, Thomas Howlett, directed in his will that his 
     15 slaves be freed, that his plantation be sold and that the 
     slaves receive the proceeds. When he died in 1856, his white 
     relatives challenged the will, but two courts upheld it.
       Yet the freed slaves never got a penny.
       Benjamin Hatcher, the executor of the estate, simply took 
     over the plantation, court records show. He cleared the 
     timber and mined the stone, providing granite for the Navy 
     and War Department buildings in Washington and the capitol in 
     Richmond, according to records in the National Archives.
       When the Civil War ended in 1865, the former slaves 
     complained to the occupying Union Army, which ordered 
     Virginia courts to investigate.
       Hatcher testified that he had sold the plantation in 1862--
     apparently to his son, Thomas--but had not given the proceeds 
     to the former slaves. Instead, court papers show, the 
     proceeds were invested on their behalf in Confederate War 
     Bonds. There is nothing in the public record to suggest the 
     former slaves wanted their money used to support the Southern 
     war effort.
       Moreover, the bonds were purchased in the former slaves' 
     names in 1864--a dubious investment at best in the fourth 
     year of the war. Within months, Union armies were marching on 
     Atlanta and Richmond, and the bonds were worthless pieces of 
     paper.
       The blacks insisted they were never given even that, but in 
     1871, Virginia's highest court rules that Hatcher was 
     innocent of wrongdoing and that the former slaves were owed 
     nothing.
       The following year, the plantation was broken up and sold 
     at a public auction. Hatcher's son received the proceeds, 
     county records show. In the 1930s, a Richmond businessman 
     cobbled the estate back together; he sold it to Willow Oaks 
     Corp. in 1955 for an unspecified amount.
       ``I don't hold anything against Willow Oaks,'' Logan said. 
     ``But how Virginia's courts acted, how they allowed the land 
     to be stolen--it goes against everything America stands 
     for.''
                                  ____


   Peculiar Land Swaps Leave Blacks With Little of Their Ancestors' 
                             Georgia Island

                          (By Dolores Barclay)

       Sapelo Island, Ga. (AP)--It was a peculiar offer: Blacks 
     could swap ancestral land in the most valuable area of this 
     barrier island for smaller parcels owned by a white tycoon in 
     a low, partly swampy enclave known as Hog Hammock.
       Yet not a single black family turned it down.
       This was Georgia in the 1950s, and the tycoon was Richard 
     J. Reynolds Jr., son of the man who built one of America's 
     biggest tobacco companies. And Sapelo residents say Reynolds 
     ruled the island.
       ``He wanted the land for his own benefit,'' said Cornelia 
     Bailey, 56, a longtime resident. ``He wanted to . . . control 
     the entire north end without pockets of blacks here and 
     there.''
       Reynolds arrived on Sapelo in 1932 and moved into a mansion 
     in a community called Raccoon Bluff. His neighbors were 
     Geechee families who retained their African-English dialect. 
     Some had lived on the island for centuries, harvesting 
     oysters and scooping up shrimp in their handmade nets.
       Reynolds owned the ferries and a lumber mill and was the 
     biggest employer on the island. And he had a powerful friend, 
     Tom Poppell, the country sheriff.
       The land swaps began in the 1950s. Deed records show that 
     in 1956, Rosa Walker exchanged a 16-acre tract in Raccoon 
     Bluff for 5.5 acres in Hog Hammock. Prince and Elizabeth 
     Carter soon traded their 9 acres in Raccoon Bluff for 2 acres 
     in Hog Hammock. And Bailey's father, Hicks Walker, now 98, 
     accepted 2 acres in Hog Hammock for 4 acres on the island's 
     northwestern nose, in an area called Belle Marsh.
       In some swaps, deed records show, blacks also received 
     ``other consideration.'' In Hicks Walker's case, his daughter 
     said, it was timber for a new house. But when the wood was 
     delivered, she said, Reynolds charged him for it.
       Nearly all of the black landowners in Raccoon Bluff--at 
     least a dozen families--made similar land swaps with 
     Reynolds.
       Why would they agree to such deals?
       Cornelia Bailey's father was pressured to make the swap, 
     she said, recalling what her parents had told her. ``They 
     started laying in subtle threats: `Now, Hicks, it would be 
     hard on you if you have to leave the island and your family's 
     here to take care of.' That was a subtle threat that . . . he 
     would lose his job.''
       On Sapelo, in those days, ``either you worked for Reynolds 
     or you didn't work at all,'' she said.
       After Reynolds' death, his wife, Annemarie S. Reynolds, 
     sold most of their Sapelo holdings to the state of Georgia 
     for $835,000 in 1969. Today, the state runs a marine research 
     institute on the island.
       Reached at her home in Switzerland, Reynolds was asked if 
     she thought the land swaps had been fair.
       ``I guess so,'' she said. ``Mr. Reynolds tried to do a good 
     thing for their benefit.''
       The Reynolds family kept some of the land, including 698 
     acres in Raccoon Bluff now managed by The Sapelo Foundation, 
     a philanthropic organization set up by Richard J. Reynolds 
     Jr.
       Ernest Walker claims some of that land is his.
       According to county tax receipts, Walker still pays 
     property taxes on 33\1/4\ acres of the land, which his 
     ancestors purchased in 1874.
       An AP search of land records found no evidence that the 
     Walker family had ever transferred it to Reynolds, the Sapelo 
     Foundation of anyone else.
                                  ____


Alabama Pushed a Black Family Off Its Land--and Left It Empty for Years

                            (By Todd Lewan)

       Sweet Water, Ala. (AP)--The legacy Lemon Williams always 
     hoped to leave to his grandchildren was the land of his 
     birth.
       His 40-acre cotton-and-bean farm was among the smallest in 
     Marengo County, but the land his grandfather had settled 
     after the Civil War meant everything to Williams.
       ``This land,'' Williams always told his son, Willie, ``is 
     part of our family, treat it like your brother.''
       Then in June 1964, a letter arrived. The State Lands 
     Division had checked the title of the property with the 
     Bureau of Land Management. The federal agency had replied 
     that, as far as it could determine, the 40 acres belonged to 
     the state.
       How could this be if, as the family's original deed said, 
     Williams' grandfather had bought the land for $480 on Jan. 3, 
     1874?
       In 1906, the letter said, the federal government had 
     designated the 40 acres as swampland and patented the 
     property to the state of Alabama. The 40-acre farm of 
     Lawrence Hudson, Williams' cousin, also belonged to the state 
     for the same reason, according to the letter. The attorney 
     general, the latter said, was now suing both families for 
     their land.
       The families gathered their children and their deeds and 
     took them to J.C. Camp, a lawyer in Linden, the county seat. 
     The lawyer and both couples have since died, but Lemon 
     Williams' son and daughter, Willie and Inez, say they recall 
     every detail of the meeting.
       ``Camp took our money, took our deeds, put them in his 
     drawer and promised he'd fix everything,'' said Willie 
     Williams, 50. ``We never saw those deeds again.''
       In 1965, a fire ravaged the Marengo County courthouse. Many 
     records survived; the file containing the Williams and Hudson 
     court case apparently did not. The Associated Press found 
     only the trial docket.
       The State Lands Division in Montgomery, however, monitored 
     the case. Letters and internal memos from those files are 
     peppered with references to the Williams and Hudson families' 
     race. They show officials adamantly opposed to allowing ``the 
     negro defendants'' to keep the land, even though they 
     acknowledged in writing that both families could trace their 
     ownership back to 1874.
       In an April 30, 1964, memo, George T. Driver, a former 
     state lands director, wrote: ``The lands are being claimed by 
     Lemon Williams .  .  . (a colored man).'' A Nov. 30, 1964, 
     memo by William G. O'Rear, chief attorney for the state 
     conservation department, refers to ``the negro defendants.'' 
     And in 1966, Marengo's tax assessor noted: ``Land Bk shows 
     above 40 acres still owned by L.B. Hudson (black).''
       A year later, Circuit Judge Emmett F. Hildreth asked the 
     state to reconsider the lawsuit. Taking the land, he wrote, 
     ``would create a severe injustice.''
       Claude D. Kelley, then Alabama's director of conservation, 
     replied that the state had no intention of dropping the 
     lawsuit because income from cutting timber on its land could 
     be used for state-run hospitals.
       In 1967, Hildreth ruled that Williams, Hudson and their 
     wives could remain on the land but could not farm or log it. 
     When they died, his decree said, the state would take 
     possession.
       Hudson died in 1975 and his wife died shortly afterward, 
     but family members say the state waited until last year to 
     ask their children to leave the farm. They moved to nearby 
     Butler.
       The Williamses moved to an acre lot several miles from 
     their old farm after Hildreth's ruling. For three decades, 
     they pleaded for the land in letters to state officials and 
     received form letters in response.
       The vine-wrapped house that was once the center of their 
     farm is slowly collapsing. Conservation officials have opened 
     some of the area to timber cutters, state records show.
       James Griggs, director of state lands, said the dispute was 
     handled properly. ``There have only been two owners of the 
     land, the federal government and the state,'' he said.
       The Associated Press, however, found deeds on file in the 
     county courthouse documenting the Hudson and Williams 
     families' ownership of the property all the way back to 1874. 
     There are also surviving records showing both families paying 
     taxes on the land from the late 1950s until the land was 
     taken.
       After being told of the AP's findings, Alabama Gov. Don 
     Slegelman read the files and said he found them 
     ``disturbing.'' He has asked the attorney general to review 
     the case.

[[Page 672]]

     
                                  ____
    Car Dealer Acquired Black Farmers' Land by Foreclosing on Loans

                          (By Dolores Barclay)

       Lexington, Miss. (AP)--Down in the Delta, folks still talk 
     about Norman Weathersby, a White Chevrolet dealer who 
     acquired hundreds of acres of black-owned land in the 1950s 
     and '60s in exchange for used pickup trucks and farm 
     equipment.
       ``Old Norman was something else,'' said Rhodolphis Hayes 
     with a shake of his head.
       The 71-year-old farmer and other Holmes County residents 
     recall the days when black farmers had to finance trucks and 
     equipment from Weathersby because, they said, the local banks 
     refused to do business with blacks.
       Weathersby, they said, required that they put up their 
     entire farms as collateral for the loans, and when a cash-
     poor farmer missed a payment, Weathersby acquired land this 
     way.
       County land records show that Henry and Mary Friend put up 
     63 acres in 1958 for a $1,598 loan. The land went to 
     Weathersby a few months later. Ed and Pattie Blissett lost 
     their 50-acre farm in 1958 after they missed a payment on a 
     1956 loan from Weathersby for $1,785. The final note of $385 
     had been due in 1960.
       It was easy for Holmes County blacks to default on their 
     loans.
       For one thing, several area residents said, the equipment 
     and trucks blacks needed to run their farms often broke down 
     shortly after they bought them from Weathersby.
       ``He'd fix it up so it could run between Lexington and 
     Tchula (a 20-minute drive). Then it would die on you,'' said 
     Griffin McLaurin Jr., 60, recalling how his father lost the 
     family's 100-acre farm in 1966 because of a $40,000 loan.
       ``When the man called in for the money, he didn't have 
     it,'' McLaurin said, and Weathersby forclosed. The son later 
     bought back 7\1/2\ acres of the land from Weathersby--for 
     $4,253.15, records show.
       Weathersby's close friend, William E. Strider, ran the 
     local Farmers Home Administration--the credit lifeline for 
     many Southern farmers. Hayes, McLaurin and others in Holmes 
     County said Strider, now dead, was often slow in releasing 
     farm operating loans to blacks.
       ``You have to do your land breaking, your fertilizing and 
     your seeds, but if you don't get the money on time, you can't 
     farm,'' Hayes said.
       In the late 1950s, Erma Russell, now 81, had businesses at 
     the FMHA office in Lexington. She was about to knock on 
     Strider's door, she said, when she heard Weathersby and 
     Strider talking.
       ``They said how they were going to get the colored folk off 
     their land through foreclosures,'' she recalled. ``They were 
     suggesting ways to have us `volunteer' to surrender our land. 
     All I could do was pray they wouldn't take it.
       The Russells paid up their loans and kept their 65-acre 
     farm. ``It wasn't easy to get this.'' She glanced out her 
     windows to a spread of ebony soil. ``We had to struggle . . . 
     We had to fight to get this, and we won.''
       When he died in 1973, Weathersby left his family about 700 
     acres blacks had once owned, according to his estate papers, 
     deeds and court papers.
       Weathersby's son 62, who now runs the dealership in 
     Indiana, said he had little direct knowledge about his 
     father's business deals and car loans. However, he said he 
     was sure his father never would have sold defective vehicles 
     and that he always treated people fairly.
       ``He helped people no matter what race,'' he said.
                                  ____


    Living in the North Gave Blacks No Guarantee Against Land Grabs

                          (By Allen G. Breed)

       Phippsburg, ME (AP)--In 1912, 45 mixed-race people living 
     on Malaga Island in the mouth of the New Meadows River were 
     thrown off their land by the state of Maine.
       ``It was ill considered and it was brutally done,'' says 
     William David Barry, a librarian at the Maine Historical 
     Society who has written about the case.
       Nearly a quarter of the islanders were sent to the Maine 
     School for the Feeble-Minded while state workers torched 
     their shacks and even dug up the bones of their ancestors, 
     according to historians and contemporary newspaper accounts.
       Most black American families that lost land through fraud 
     and intimidation lived in the South. The story of Malaga, 
     however, shows that living in the North provided no 
     guarantee.
       Historians believe the 41-acre island, just 100 yards from 
     shore, was settled by free blacks during the Civil War. For 
     years, they lived unmolested on the island, but as the 20th 
     century dawned, that changed.
       The year 1912 was a difficult one in Maine. The state's 
     shipbuilding industry was waning, and the summer cottage 
     industry was just beginning to develop. About this time, some 
     educated Mainers were embracing eugenics--a pseudo-science 
     holding that the poor and handicapped should be removed from 
     the gene pool.
       Locals wanted to get rid of the poor, unsightly colony, but 
     state authorities needed the appearance of legality. They 
     declared that the island was the property of the Perry 
     family, which had been among Phippsburg's earliest settlers.
       Although the Perrys had purchased the island in 1818, an 
     Associated Press search of town records found no evidence 
     that the family had paid taxes on it. The residents of Malaga 
     had lived there for half a century--far longer than the 20 
     years necessary to establish ownership under Maine law.
       Nevertheless, the state bought the island from the Perry 
     heirs in December 1911 and ordered the islanders to leave by 
     July 1, 1912. Residents were paid varying sums for their 
     houses--between $50 and $300--but given nothing for the land, 
     according to minutes of the Governor's Executive Council.
       Locals say no one has lived there since.
       In 1989, property records show, the island was purchased by 
     T. Ricardo Quesada of Freeport, Maine, co-owner of a 
     commercial development company.
       Assessed at $87,400, the island is barren but for some 
     trees and drying lobster pots.
       ``The island is used by the family for various purposes,'' 
     Quesada said. ``And we think the less publicity about it the 
     better.''
       The African-American Geneological Society of New England is 
     considering asking the governor for a formal apology for 
     Malaga. Gov. Angus S. King Jr. is on record as saying that if 
     the apology is requested, he will make it.
                                  ____


        Landownership Made Blacks Targets of Violence and Murder

          (By Dolores Barclay, Todd Lewan and Allen G. Breed)

       As a little girl, Doria Dee Johnson often asked about the 
     man in the portrait hanging in an aunt's living room--her 
     great-great-grandfather. ``It's too painful,'' her elderly 
     relatives would say, and they would look away.
       A few years ago, Johnson, now 40, went to look for answers 
     in the rural town of Abbeville, S.C.
       She learned that in his day, the man in the portrait, 
     Anthony P. Crawford, was one of the most prosperous farmers 
     in Abbeville County. That is, until Oct. 21, 1916--the day 
     the 51-year-old farmer hauled a wagon-load of cotton to town.
       Crawford ``seems to have been the type of negro who is most 
     offensive to certain elements of the white people,'' Mrs. 
     J.B. Holman would say a few days later in a letter published 
     by The Abbeville Press and Banner. ``He was getting rich, for 
     a negro, and he was insolent along with it.''
       Crawford's prosperity had made him a target.
       The success of blacks such as Crawford threatened the reign 
     of white supremacy, said Stewart E. Tolnay, a sociologist at 
     the University of Washington and co-author of a book on 
     lynchings. ``There were obvious limitations, or ceilings, 
     that blacks weren't supposed to go beyond.''
       In the decades between the Civil War and the civil rights 
     era, one of those limitations was owning land, historians 
     say.
       Racial violence in America is a familiar story, but the 
     importance of land as a motive for lynchings and white mob 
     attacks on blacks has been widely overlooked. And the 
     resulting land losses suffered by black families such as the 
     Crawfords have gone largely unreported.
       The Associated Press documented 57 violent land takings--
     more than half of the 107 land takings found in an 18-month 
     investigation of black land loss in America. The other cases 
     involved trickery and legal manipulations.
       Sometimes, black landowners were attacked by whites who 
     just wanted to drive them from their property. In other 
     cases, the attackers wanted the land for themselves.
       For many decades successful blacks ``lived with a gnawing 
     fear . . . that white neighbors could at any time do 
     something violent and take everything from them,'' said Loren 
     Schweninger, a University of North Carolina expert on black 
     landownership.
       While waiting his turn at the gin that fall day in 1916, 
     Crawford entered the mercantile store of W.D. Barksdale. 
     Contemporary newspaper accounts and the papers of then Gov. 
     Richard Manning detail what follows:
       Barksdale offered Crawford 85 cents a pound for his 
     cottonseed, Crawford replied that he had a better offer. 
     Barksdale called him a liar; Crawford called the storekeeper 
     a cheat. Three clerks grabbed ax handles, and Crawford backed 
     into the street, where the sheriff appeared and arrested 
     Crawford--for cursing a white man.
       Released on bail, Crawford was cornered by about 50 whites 
     who beat and knifed him. The sheriff carried him back to 
     jail. A few hours later, a deputy gave the mob the keys to 
     Crawford's cell.
       Sundown found them at a baseball field at the edge of town. 
     There, they hanged Crawford from a solitary Southern pine.
       No one was ever tried for the killing. In its aftermath 
     hundreds of blacks, including some of the Crawfords, fled 
     Abbeville.
       Two whites were appointed executors of Crawford's estate, 
     which included 427 acres of prime cotton land. One was Andrew 
     J. Ferguson, cousin of two of the mob's ringleaders, the 
     Press and Banner reported.

[[Page 673]]

       Crawford's children inherited the farm, but Ferguson 
     liquidated much of the rest of Crawford's property including 
     his cotton, which went to Barksdale. Ferguson kept $5,438--
     more than half the proceeds--and gave Crawford's children 
     just $200 each, estate papers show.
       Crawford's family struggled to hold the farm together but 
     eventually lost it when they couldn't pay off a $2,000 
     balance on a bank loan. Although the farm was assessed at 
     $20,000 at the time, a white man paid $504 for it at the 
     foreclosure auction, according to land records.
       ``There's land taken away and there's murder,'' said 
     Johnson, of Alexandria, VA. ``But the biggest crime was that 
     our famly was split up by this. My family got scattered into 
     the night.''
       The former Crawford land provided timber to several owners 
     before International Paper Corp. acquired it last year. Jenny 
     Boardman, a company spokeswoman, said International Paper was 
     unaware of the land's history. When told about it, she said: 
     ``The Crawford story is tragic. It causes you to think that 
     there are facets of our history that need to be discussed and 
     addressed.''
       Other current owners of property involved in violent land 
     takings also said they knew little about the history of their 
     land, and most were disturbed when informed about it.
       The Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the 
     Advancement of Colored People have documented more than 3,000 
     lynchings between 1865 and 1965, and believe there were more. 
     Many of those lynched were property owners, said Ray Winbush, 
     director of Fisk University's Race Relations Institute.
       ``If you are looking for stolen black land,'' he said, 
     ``just follow the lynching trail.''
       Some white officials condoned the violence; a few added 
     threats of their own.
       ``If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be 
     lynched,'' James K. Vardaman declared while governor of 
     Mississippi (1904-1908). ``It will be done to maintain white 
     supremacy.''
       In some places, the AP found, single families were 
     targeted. Elsewhere, entire black communities were destroyed.
       Today, Birmingham, Ky., lies under a floodway created in 
     the 1940s. But at the start of the 20th century, it was a 
     tobacco center with a predominantly black population, and a 
     battleground in a five-year siege by white marauders called 
     Night Riders.
       On the night of March 8, 1908, about 100 armed whites tore 
     through town on horseback, shooting seven blacks, three of 
     them fatally. The AP documented the cases of 14 black 
     landowners who were driven from Birmingham. Together, they 
     lost more than 60 acres of farmland and 21 city lots to 
     whites--many at sheriff's sales, all for low prices.
       John Scruggs and his young granddaughter were killed in 
     Birmingham that night, The Courier-Journal of Louisville 
     reported at the time. Property records show that the city lot 
     Scruggs had bought for $25 in 1902 was sold for nonpayment of 
     taxes six years after the attack. A local white man bought it 
     for $7.25 (or about $144 in today's dollars).
       Land that had belonged to other blacks went for even less. 
     John Puckett's 2 acres sold for $4.70; Ben Kelley's city lot 
     went for just $2.60.
       In Pierce City, Mo., 1,000 armed whites burned down five 
     black-owned houses and killed four blacks on Aug. 18, 1901. 
     Within four days, all of the town's 129 blacks had fled, 
     never to return, according to a contemporary report in The 
     Lawrence Chieftain newspaper. The AP documented the cases of 
     nine Pierce City blacks who lost a total of 30 acres of 
     farmland and 10 city lots. Whites bought it all at bargain 
     prices.
       Eviline Brinson, whose house was burned down by the mob, 
     sold her lot for $25 to a white woman after the attack. 
     Brinson had paid $96 for the empty lot in 1889, county 
     records show.
       The attacks on Birmingham and Pierce City were part of a 
     pattern in Southern and border states in the first half of 
     the 20th century: Lynchings and mob attacks on blacks, 
     followed by an exodus of black citizens, some of them forced 
     to abandon their property or sell it at cut-rate prices.
       ``Black landowners were put under a tremendous amount of 
     pressure, from authorities and otherwise, to give up their 
     land and leave,'' said Earl N.M. Gooding, director of the 
     Center for Urban and Rural Research at Alabama A&M 
     University. ``They became refugees in their own country.''
       For example, the AP found that 18 black families lost a 
     total of 330 acres plus 48 city lots when they fled Ocoee, 
     Fla., after a 1920 Election Day attack on the black 
     community. Some were able to sell their land at a fair price, 
     but others such as Valentine High Tower were not. He parted 
     with 52 acres for $10 in 1926, property records show.
       Today the land lost by the 18 Ocoee families, not including 
     buildings now on it, is assessed at more than $4.2 million. 
     (Officials assess property for tax purposes, and the 
     valuation is usually less than its market value.)
       Sometimes, individual black farmers were singled out and 
     attacked by bands of white farmers known as the Whitecaps. 
     Operating in several Southern and border states around the 
     turn of the 20th century, they were intent on driving blacks 
     from their land and discouraging other blacks from acquiring 
     it, said historian George C. Wright, provost at the 
     University of Texas at Arlington.
       ``The law wouldn't help,'' he said. ``There was just no one 
     to turn to.''
       Whitecaps often nailed notes with crudely drawn coffins to 
     the doors of black landowners, warning them to leave or die.
       The warning to Eli Hilson of Lincoln County, Miss., came on 
     Nov. 18, 1903, when Whitecaps shot up his house just hours 
     after his new baby was born, The Brookhaven Leader newspaper 
     reported at the time. Hilson ignored the warning.
       A month later, the 39-year-old farmer was shot in the head 
     as he drove his buggy toward his farm, the newspaper said. 
     The horse trotted home, delivering Hilson's body to his wife, 
     Hannah.
       She struggled to raise their 11 children and work the 74-
     acre farm, but she could not manage without her husband. 
     Hannah Hilson lost the property through a mortgage 
     foreclosure in 1905. According to land records, the farm went 
     for $439 to S.P. Oliver, a member of the county board of 
     supervisors. Today, the property is assessed at $61,642.
       It wasn't just Whitecaps and Night Riders who chased blacks 
     from their land. Sometimes, officials did it.
       In Yazoo County, Miss., Norman Stephens and his twin 
     brother, Homer, ran a trucking business, hauling cotton 
     pickers to plantations. One day in 1950, a white farmer 
     demanded that Stephens immediately deliver workers to his 
     field, Stephens' widow, Rosie Fields, said in a recent 
     interview.
       Stephens explained he had other commitments and promised to 
     drop off the men later, his wife said. The farmer fetched the 
     sheriff.
       That evening, the brothers found themselves locked in a 
     second-floor room at the county jail. They squeezed through a 
     window, leaped to the ground and ran. Fields, now 83, said 
     her husband later told her why: They had overheard the 
     sheriff, who has since died, talking about where to hide 
     their bodies.
       Once home, Fields said, Stephens and his brother packed 
     their bags and flagged down a bus to Ohio. A year later, she 
     and her five children joined them.
       For a decade, the family made mortgage and property tax 
     payments on the house they left behind, records show. But it 
     was hard to keep up, and they never dared to return, Fields 
     said. Finally, in the 1960s, they stopped paying and lost the 
     house they had purchased for $700 in 1942.
       One aim of racial violence was to deny blacks the tools to 
     build wealth, said John Hope Franklin, chairman of President 
     Clinton's Advisory Board on Race.
       Paula J. Giddings, a Duke University historian, said that 
     ``by the 1880s and 1890s, a significant number of blacks 
     began to do very well in terms of entrepreneurship and 
     landownership, and it simply couldn't be tolerated.
       In 1885, Thomas Moss, Henry Stewart and Calvin McDowell 
     opened the Peoples' Grocery Store in a largely black Memphis 
     neighborhood known as The Curve. Across the street was 
     another grocery, owned by a white man, W.H. Barret.
       On Saturday, March 5, 1892, two boys--one black, the other 
     white--squabbled over a game of marbles near the store, which 
     led to a dispute between their fathers. Barret went to the 
     police, claiming black shopkeepers were instigating trouble.
       Contemporary newspaper accounts describe what ensued:
       Some townspeople warned the shopkeepers that a white mob 
     was planning to attack their store. So when nine deputy 
     sheriffs in civilian clothing tried to enter after dark 
     Sunday to deliver arrest warrants, they were taken for 
     intruders and fired on. Three deputies were wounded. Moss, 
     Stewart and McDowell were jailed.
       Early Wednesday morning, a mob of about 75 whites yanked 
     the three men from their cells while other whites looted the 
     grocery.
       In the aftermath, more than 2,000 blacks streamed out of 
     Memphis, according to contemporary newspaper accounts. 
     Creditors liquidated whatever stock the looters left behind, 
     and the store landed in the hands of John C. Reilly, a deputy 
     sheriff.
       Over the years, the property has been resold many times, 
     and today is the site of a small business, the Panama 
     Grocery.
       As for the three store owners, their bullet-torn bodies 
     turned up in a ravine near the Wolf River, The Memphis 
     Appeal-Avalanche reported at the time.
       When Moss' body was found, his hands were clenched, the 
     newspaper noted. They were filled with grass and the brown 
     clay of Tennessee.
                                  ____


              Taking Away the Vote--and a Black Man's Land

                            (By Todd Lewan)

       Columbus, Miss. (AP).--Robert Gleed was 17 when he escaped 
     from a Virginia slaveowner and trailed his sweetheart to 
     eastern Mississippi. Here, in the years after the Civil War, 
     he prospered, owning 295 acres of farmland, three city lots, 
     a stately home and a general store, according to county 
     records.
       It was a time when America's blacks were testing their new 
     freedom under the protection of the occupying Union army. 
     Many

[[Page 674]]

     were acquiring land, voting, building schools, joining the 
     ranks of the Republican Party--the party of Lincoln.
       But one violent night in the waning days of Reconstruction, 
     Nov. 1, 1875, Gleed lost it all.
       He had been running for sheriff of Lowndes County. On the 
     eve of the election, a mob of whites attacked a parade of his 
     supporters. Four blacks were killed, one on the sidewalk in 
     front of Gleed's store.
       Gleed was a man of stature in Columbus--president of the 
     Mercantile Land and Banking Co., head of the county Chamber 
     of Commerce, a two-time Mississippi state senator who had 
     helped pass a law against racial discrimination on public 
     transportation.
       But the only thing that saved him that night, according to 
     historical accounts, was a white friend who hid him in a 
     well.
       At the time, Lowndes County had 3,800 registered black 
     voters, nearly all of them Republicans, as was Gleed. There 
     were only 1,250 whites registered, nearly all as Democrats, 
     the Columbus Press reported at the time.
       As the mob of torch-carrying whites surged through town on 
     election eve, fires broke out. Whites invaded Gleed's house, 
     shot up his furniture, shredded his wife's clothing.
       The next day, Gleed's opponent, a white Democrat, was 
     elected sheriff. Gleed fled to Paris, Texas, leaving behind 
     his house, his general store and its stock, his city lots and 
     farmland.
       Soon after, two white townspeople claimed Gleed owed them 
     money and foreclosed on his property, records show.
       Toby W. Johnston liquidated the store and stock, pocketing 
     $941. Bernard G. Hendrick, a city councilman, took 215 acres 
     of Gleed's farm for what he said was a $125 debt. Hendrick 
     snapped up Gleed's home and an adjacent lot for $11 at an 
     auction and later took the rest of Gleed's city holdings for 
     $500.
       In the 1940s, the old Gleed farm was sold to the federal 
     government; today, U.S. Highway 50 runs through it. One of 
     Gleed's city lots now holds four houses, a gas station and 
     Associated Realty.
       ``I guess I don't care who owned it previously,'' Bob Oaks, 
     president of the realty company, said when told about Gleed. 
     ``That's bad, but it sounds like he abandoned his property.''
       Gleed was 80 when he died on July 24, 1916. His obituary in 
     the Columbus Commercial newspaper said he was ``believed to 
     have been the last remaining negro who has served Lowndes 
     County in an office which is now filled by honorable and 
     distinguished white citizens.''
                                  ____


                 A Man Is Jailed for Defending His Land

                          (By Dolores Barclay)

       Franklin, Ky. (AP).--George and Mary Dinning were in bed, 
     asleep, when riders came to drive them from their land. By 
     morning, a man lay dead, and George Dinning was on his way to 
     jail.
       What happened that raw night in January 1897 is told in 
     depositions and trial testimony from Dinning, his wife, Mary, 
     and members of the mob that attacked their tobacco farm. The 
     accounts are similar; sometimes, even the same words appear. 
     Contemporary news accounts from The Courier-Journal newspaper 
     of Louisville and the papers of Gov. William O. Bradley add 
     to the story:
       About 11 p.m., 25 white men on horseback surrounded 
     Dinning's farm, a 124-acre spread that spilled over the hills 
     of southern Kentucky into Tennessee. Then came pounding at 
     the front and back doors.
       ``I will give you just 10 days to get away from here, and 
     don't you stop within 40 miles,'' a man said.
       ``What have I done?'' Dinning asked.
       You stole turkeys and chickens, the man answered. Dinning 
     began to explain that he could account for everything he 
     owned.
       Boom! The back door exploded.
       Bleeding from a wound in his arm, Dinning ran through 
     gunfire up the stairs, past his wife and six children. He 
     grabbed his shotgun, opened a front bedroom window and fired. 
     A man named Jodie Conn fell dead. The mob retreated with his 
     body, but not before a bullet creased Dinning's head.
       Dinning turned himself in to the sheriff of Simpson County, 
     who moved him to Bowling Green, a three-day journey, and then 
     farther still to Louisville, to escape white mobs.
       Riders came for Mary Dinning the next day.
       Leave or hang, they told her. She begged for more time; her 
     12-year-old daughter was feverish. She and the children could 
     stay inside the burning house, the mob retorted.
       ``Near sundown,'' she later testified, ``I started with my 
     six children, the youngest being 4 months old, the oldest 13 
     years. I was so badly frightened when I left, that I did not 
     take time to put wrappings on myself or children.
       ``The next night after leaving,'' she continued, ``my house 
     and everything on Earth we had . . . was destroyed by fire.''
       An all-white jury convicted Dinning of manslaughter, and he 
     was sentenced to seven years in prison. The men who attacked 
     his home were never arrested.
       Petitions to pardon Dinning poured in from prominent whites 
     including Louisville Mayor George Todd. After much pressure, 
     Bradley granted a pardon, on July 17, 1897.
                                  ____


  AP Documents Land Taken From Blacks Through Trickery, Violence and 
                                 Murder

                  (By Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay)

       For generations, black families passed down the tales in 
     uneasy whispers: ``They stole our land.''
       These were family secrets shared after the children fell 
     asleep, after neighbors turned down the lamps--old stories 
     locked in fear and shame.
       Some of those whispered bits of oral history, it turns out, 
     are true.
       In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press 
     documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated 
     out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, 
     violence and even murder.
       In some cases, government officials approved the land 
     takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest 
     occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated 
     today.
       Some of the land taken from black families has become a 
     country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi, a major-
     league baseball spring training facility in Florida.
       The United States has a long history of bitter, often 
     violent land disputes, from claim jumping in the gold fields 
     to range wars in the old West to broken treaties with 
     American Indians. Poor white landowners, too, were sometimes 
     treated unfairly, pressured to sell out a rock-bottom prices 
     by railroads and lumber and mining companies.
       The fate of black landowners has been an overlooked part of 
     this story.
       The AP--in an investigation that included interviews with 
     more than 1,000 people and the examination of tens of 
     thousands of public records in county courthouses and state 
     and federal archives--documented 107 land takings in 13 
     Southern and border states.
       In those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more than 
     24,000 acres of farm and timber land plus 85 smaller 
     properties, including stores and city lots. Today, virtually 
     all of this property, valued at tens of millions of dollars, 
     is owned by whites or by corporations.
       Properties taken from blacks were often small--a 40-acre 
     farm, a general store, a modest house. But the losses were 
     devastating to families struggling to overcome the legacy of 
     slavery. In the agrarian South, landownership was the ladder 
     to respect and prosperity--the means to building economic 
     security and passing wealth on to the next generation. When 
     black families lost their land, they lost all of this.
       ``When they steal your land, they steal your future,'' said 
     Stephanie Hagans, 40, of Atlanta, who has been researching 
     how her great-grandmother, Ablow Weddington Stewart, lost 35 
     acres in Matthews, N.C. A white lawyer foreclosed on Stewart 
     in 1942 after he refused to allow her to finish paying off a 
     $540 debt, witnesses told the AP.
       ``How different would our lives be,'' Hagans asked, ``if 
     we'd had the opportunities, the pride that land brings?''
       No one knows how many black families have been unfairly 
     stripped of their land, but there are indications of 
     extensive loss.
       Besides the 107 cases the AP documented, reporters found 
     evidence of scores of other land takings that could not be 
     fully verified because of gaps or inconsistencies in the 
     public record. Thousands of additional reports of land 
     takings from black families remain uninvestigated.
       Two thousand have been collected in recent years by the 
     Penn Center on St. Helena Island, S.C., an educational 
     institution established for freed slaves during the Civil 
     War. The Land Loss Prevention Project, a group of lawyers in 
     Durham, N.C., who represent blacks in land disputes, said it 
     receives new reports daily. And Heather Gray of the 
     Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta said her 
     organization has ``file cabinets full of complaints.''
       AP's findings ``are just the tip of one of the biggest 
     crimes of this country's history,'' said Ray Winbush, 
     director of Fisk University's Institute of Race Relations.
       Some examples of land takings documented by the AP:
       After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men 
     surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and 
     ordered him to come out for a whipping. When David Walker 
     refused and shot at them instead, the mob poured coal oil on 
     his house and set it afire, according to contemporary 
     newspaper accounts. Pleading for mercy, Walker ran out the 
     front door, followed by four screaming children and his wife, 
     carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding 
     three children and killing the others. Walker's oldest son 
     never escaped the burning house. No one was ever charged with 
     the killings, and the surviving children were deprived of the 
     farm their father died defending. Land records show that 
     Walker's 2\1/2\-acre farm was simply folded into the property 
     of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it to another 
     man, whose daughters own the undeveloped land today.
       In the 1950s and 1960s, a Chevrolet dealer in Holmes 
     County, Miss., acquired hundreds of acres from black farmers 
     by foreclosing on small loans for farm equipment and pickup 
     trucks. Norman Weathersby, then the only dealer in the area, 
     required the farmers to put up their land as security for the 
     loans, county residents who dealt with him said.

[[Page 675]]

     And the equipment he sold them, they said, often broke down 
     shortly thereafter. Weathersby's friend, William E. Strider, 
     ran the local Farmers Home Administration--the credit 
     lifeline for many Southern farmers. Area residents, including 
     Erma Russell, 81, said Strider, now dead, was often slow in 
     releasing farm operating loans to blacks. When cash-poor 
     farmers missed payments owned to Weathersby, he took their 
     land. The AP documented eight cases in which Weathersby 
     acquired black-owned farms this way. When he died in 1973, he 
     left more than 700 acres of this land to his family, 
     according to estate papers, deeds and court records.
       In 1964, the state of Alabama sued Lemon Williams and 
     Lawrence Hudson, claiming the cousins had no right to two 40-
     acre farms their family had worked in Sweet Water, Ala., for 
     nearly a century. The land, officials contended, belonged to 
     the state, Circuit Judge Emmett F. Hildreth urged the state 
     to drop its suit, declaring it would result in ``a severe 
     injustice.'' But when the state refused, saying it wanted 
     income from timber on the land, the judge ruled against the 
     family. Today, the land lies empty; the state recently opened 
     some of it to logging. The state's internal memos and letters 
     on the case are peppered with references to the family's 
     race.
       In the same courthouse where the case was heard, the AP 
     located deeds and tax records documenting that the family had 
     owned the land since an ancestor bought the property Jan. 3, 
     1874. Surviving records also show the family paid property 
     taxes on the farms from the mid-1950s until the land was 
     taken.
       AP reporters tracked the land cases by reviewing deeds, 
     mortgages, tax records, estate papers, court proceedings, 
     surveyor, maps, oil and gas leases, marriage, records, census 
     listings, birth records, death certificates and Freedmen's 
     Bureau archives. Additional documents, including FBI files 
     and Farmers Home Administration records, were obtained 
     through the Freedom on Information Act.
       The AP interviewed black families that lost land, as well 
     as lawyers, title searchers, historians, appraiser, 
     genealogists, surveyors, land activists, and local, state and 
     federal officials.
       The AP also talked to current owners of the land, nearly 
     all of whom acquired the properties years after the land 
     takings occurred. Most said they knew little about the 
     history of their land. When told about it, most expressed 
     regret.
       Weathersby's son, John, 62, who now runs the dealership in 
     Indianoia, Miss., said he had little direct knowledge about 
     his father's business affairs. However, he said he was sure 
     his father never would have sold defective vehicles and that 
     he always treated people fairly.
       Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman examined the state's files on 
     the Sweet Water case after an inquiry from the AP. He said he 
     found them ``disturbing'' and has asked the state attorney 
     general to review the matter.
       ``What I have asked the attorney general to do, ``he said, 
     ``is look not only at the letter of the law but what is fair 
     and right.''
       The land takings are part of a larger picture--a 91-year 
     decline in black landownership in America.
       In 1910, black Americans owned more farmland that at any 
     time before or since--at least 15 million acres. Nearly all 
     of it was in the South, largely in Mississippi, Alabama and 
     the Carolinas, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. 
     Today, blacks own only 1.1 million of the country's more than 
     1 billion acres of arable land. They are part owners another 
     1.07 million acres.
       The number of white farmers has declined over the last 
     century, too, as economic trends have concentrated land in 
     fewer, often corporate, hands. However, black ownership had 
     declined 2\1/2\ times faster than white ownership, the U.S. 
     Civil Rights Commission noted in a 1982 report, the last 
     comprehensive federal study on the trend.
       The decline in black landownership had a number of causes, 
     including the discriminatory lending practices of the Farmers 
     Home Administration and the migration of blacks from the 
     rural South to industrial centers in the North and West.
       However, the land takings also contributed. In the decades 
     between Reconstruction and the civil rights struggle, black 
     families were powerless to prevent them, said Stuart E. 
     Tolnay, a University of Washington sociologist and co-author 
     of a book on lynchings. In an era when black Americans could 
     not drink from the same water fountains as whites and black 
     men were lynched for whistling at white women, few blacks 
     dared to challenge whites. Those who did could rarely find 
     lawyers to take their cases or judges who would give them a 
     fair hearing.
       The Rev. Isaac Simmons was an exception. When his land was 
     taken, he found a lawyer and tried to fight back.
       In 1942, his 141-acre farm in Amite County, Miss., was sold 
     for nonpayment of taxes, property records show. The farm, for 
     which his father had paid $302 in 1887, was bought by a white 
     man for $180.
       Only partial, tattered tax records for the period exist 
     today in the county courthouse; but they are enough to show 
     that tax payments on at least part of the property were 
     current when the land was taken.
       Simmons hired a lawyer in February 1944 and filed suit to 
     get his land back. On March 26, a group of whites paid 
     Simmons a visit.
       The minister's daughter Laura Lee Houston, now 74, recently 
     recalled her terror as she stood with her month-old baby in 
     her arms and watched the men drag Simmons away. ``I screamed 
     and hollered so loud,'' she said. ``They came toward me and I 
     ran down in the woods.''
       The whites then grabbed Simmons' son, Eldridge, from his 
     house and drove the two men to a lonely road.
       ``Two of them kept beating me,'' Eldridge Simmons later 
     told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
     People. ``They kept telling me that my father and I were 
     `smart niggers' for going to see a lawyer.''
       Simmons, who has since died, said his captors gave him 10 
     days to leave town and told his father to start running. 
     Later that day, the minister's body turned up with three 
     gunshot wounds in the back, The McComb Enterprise newspaper 
     reported at the time.
       Today, the Simmons land--thick with timber and used for 
     hunting--is privately owned and is assessed at $33,660. 
     (Officials assess property for tax purposes, and the 
     valuation is usually less than its market value.)
       Over the past 20 years, a handful of black families have 
     sued to regain their ancestral lands. State courts, however, 
     have dismissed their cases on grounds that statutes of 
     limitations had expired.
       A group of attorneys led by Harvard University law 
     professor Charles J. Ogletree has been making inquires 
     recently about land takings. The group has announced its 
     intention to file a national class-action lawsuit in pursuit 
     of reparations for slavery and racial discrimination. 
     However, some legal experts say redress for many land takings 
     may not be possible unless laws are changes.
       As the acres slipped away, so did treasured pieces of 
     family history--cabins crafted by a grandfather's hand, 
     family graves in shaded groves.
       But ``the home place'' meant more than just that. Many 
     blacks have found it ``very difficult to transfer wealth from 
     one generation to the next,'' because they had trouble 
     holding onto land, said Paula Giddings, a history professor 
     at Duke University.
       The Espy family in Vero Beach, Fla., lost its heritage in 
     1942, when the U.S. government seized its land through 
     eminent domain to build an airfield. Government agencies 
     frequently take land this way for public purposes under rules 
     that require fair compensation for the owners.
       In Vero Beach, however, the Navy appraised the Espys' 147 
     acres, which included a 30-acre fruit grove, two houses and 
     40 house lots, at $8,000, according to court records. The 
     Espys sued, and an all-white jury awarded them $13,000. That 
     amounted to one-sixth of the price per acre that the Navy 
     paid white neighbors for similar land with fewer 
     improvements, records show.
       After World War II, the Navy gave the airfield to the city 
     of Vero Beach. Ignoring the Espys plea to buy back their 
     land, the city sold part of it, at $1,500 an acre, to the Los 
     Angeles Dodgers in 1965 as a spring training facility.
       In 1999, the former Navy land, with part of Dodgertown and 
     a municipal airport, was assessed at $6.19 million. Sixty 
     percent of that land once belonged to the Espys. The team 
     sold its property to Indian River County for $10 million in 
     August, according to Craig Callan, a Dodger official.
       The true extent of land takings from black families will 
     never be known because of gaps in property and tax records in 
     many rural Southern counties. The AP found crumbling tax 
     records, deed books with pages torn from them, file folders 
     with documents missing, and records that had been crudely 
     altered.
       In Jackson Parish, La., 40 years of moldy, gnawed tax and 
     mortgage records were piled in a cellar behind a roll of 
     Christmas lights and a wooden reindeer. In Yazoo County, 
     Miss., volumes of tax and deed records filled a classroom in 
     an abandoned school, the papers coated with white dust from a 
     falling ceiling. The AP retrieved dozens of documents that 
     custodians said were earmarked for shredders or landfills.
       The AP also found that about a third of the county 
     courthouses in Southern and border states have burned--some 
     more than once--since the Civil War. Some of the fires were 
     deliberately set.
       On the night of Sept. 10, 1932, for example, 15 whites 
     torched the courthouse in Paulding, Miss., where property 
     records for the eastern half of Jasper County, then 
     predominantly black, were stored. Records for the 
     predominantly white western half of the county were safe in 
     another courthouse miles away.
       The door to the Paulding courthouse's safe, which protected 
     the records, had been locked the night before, the Jasper 
     County News reported at the time. The next morning, the safe 
     was found open, most of the records reduced to ashes.
       Suddenly, it was unclear who owned a big piece of eastern 
     Jasper County.
       Even before the courthouse fire, landownership in Jasper 
     County was contentious. According to historical accounts, the 
     Ku Klux Klan, resentful that blacks were buying and profiting 
     from land, had been attacking black-owned farms, burning 
     houses, lynching black farmers and chasing black landowners 
     away.

[[Page 676]]

       The Masonite Corp., a wood products company, was one of the 
     largest landowners in the area. Because most of the land 
     records had been destroyed, the company went to court in 
     December 1937 to clear its title. Masonite believed it owned 
     9,581 acres and said in court papers that it had been unable 
     to locate anyone with a rival claim to the land.
       A month later, the court ruled the company had clear title 
     to the land, which has since yielded millions of dollars in 
     natural gas, timber and oil, according to state records.
       From the few property records that remain, the AP was able 
     to document that at least 204.5 of those acres had been 
     acquired by Masonite after black owners were driven off by 
     the Klan. At least 850,000 barrels of oil have been pumped 
     from this property, according to state oil and gas board 
     records and figures from the Petroleum Technology Transfer 
     Council, and industry group.
       Today, the land is owned by International Paper Corp., 
     which acquired Masonite in 1988, Jenny Boardman, a company 
     spokeswoman, said International Paper had been unaware of the 
     ``tragic'' history of the land and was concerned about AP's 
     findings.
       ``This is probably part of a much larger, public debate 
     about whether there should be restitution for people who have 
     been harmed in the past,'' she said. ``And by virtue of the 
     fact that we now own these lands, we should be part of that 
     discussion.''
       Even when Southern courthouses remained standing, mistrust 
     and fear of white authority long kept blacks, away from 
     record rooms, where documents often were segregated into 
     ``white'' and ``colored.'' Many elderly blacks say they still 
     remember how they were snubbed by court clerks, spat upon and 
     even struck.
       Today, however, fear and shame have given way to pride. 
     Interest in genealogy among black families is surging, and 
     some black Americans are unearthing the documents behind 
     those whispered stories.
       ``People are out there wondering: What ever happened to 
     Grandma's land?'' said Loretta Carter Hanes, 75, a retired 
     genealogist. ``They knew that their grandparents shed a lot 
     of blood and tears to get it.''
       Bryan Logan, a 55-year-old sports writer from Washington, 
     D.C., was researching his heritage when he uncovered a 
     connection to 264 acres of riverfront property in Richmond, 
     Va.
       Today, the land is Willow Oaks, an almost exclusively white 
     country club with an assessed value of $2.94 million. But in 
     the 1850s, it was a corn-and-wheat plantation worked by the 
     Howlett slaves--Logan's ancestors.
       Their owner, Thomas Howlett, directed in his will that his 
     15 slaves be freed, that his plantation be sold and that the 
     slaves receive the proceeds. When he died in 1856, his white 
     relatives challenged the will, but two courts upheld it.
       Yet the freed slaves never got a penny.
       Benjamin Hatcher, the executor of the estate, simply took 
     over the plantation, court records show. He cleared the 
     timber and mined the stone, providing granite for the Navy 
     and War Department buildings in Washington and the Capitol in 
     Richmond, according to records in the National Archives.
       When the Civil War ended in 1865, the former slaves 
     complained to the occupying Union Army, which ordered 
     Virginia courts to investigate.
       Hatcher testified that he had sold the planatation in 
     1862--apparently to this son, Thomas--but had not given the 
     proceeds to the former slaves. Instead, court papers show, 
     the proceeds were invested on their behalf in Confederate War 
     Bonds. There is nothing in the public record to suggest the 
     former slaves wanted their money used to support the Southern 
     war effort.
       Moreover, the bonds were purchased in the former slaves' 
     names in 1864--a dubious investment at best in the fourth 
     year of the war. Within months, Union armies were marching on 
     Atlanta and Richmond, and the bonds were worthless pieces of 
     paper.
       The blacks insisted they were never given even that, but in 
     1871, Virginia's highest court ruled that Hatcher was 
     innocent of wrongdoing and that the former slaves were owed 
     nothing.
       The following year, the plantation was broken up and sold 
     at a public auction. Hatcher's son received the proceeds, 
     county records show. In the 1930s, a Richmond businessman 
     cobbled the estate back together; he sold it to Willow Oaks 
     Corp, in 1955 for an unspecified amount.
       ``I don't hold anything against Willow Oaks,'' Logan said. 
     ``But how Virginia's courts acted, how they allowed the land 
     to be stolen--it goes against everything America stands 
     for.''

  This research was compiled in a three-part series title Torn from the 
Land, which detailed how blacks in America were cheated out of their 
land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even murder. 
Some had their land foreclosed for minor debts. Still others lost their 
land to tricky legal maneuvers, still being used today, called 
partitioning, in which savvy buyers can acquire an entire family's 
property if just one heir agrees to sell them one parcel, however 
small.
  Just like many blacks with roots in the South, I grew up hearing 
stories of land lost by relatives and family friends. These stories 
were so commonplace and pervasive that I worked with Penn Community 
Center on St. Helena Island in South Carolina for many years before I 
came to the Congress studying these land takings. To date, Penn Center 
has collected reports of 2,000 similar cases that remain 
uninvestigated. And there are other institutions around the South 
collecting the same kind of information.
  Mr. Speaker, just like the Crawfords and many other black families 
with roots in the South, I grew up hearing stories of land lost by 
relatives and family friends. These stories were so commonplace and 
pervasive that I worked with the Penn Community Center on St. Helena 
Island in Beaufort County, South Carolina, for many years before I came 
to Congress, studying these land takings.
  To date, Penn Center has collected reports of 2,000 similar cases 
that remain uninvestigated. And there are other institutions around the 
South collecting the same kind of information.
  The question now is, Where do we go from here? What do we do with 
this information? As with most legislators, my natural inclination is 
to introduce a bill, but I do not think that is a proper response in 
this instance, at least not at this time.

                              {time}  1915

  Maybe later.
  What I think is called for at this time is legal action. Harvard 
professor Charles Ogletree, who has been at the forefront of the 
reparations movement, has expressed an interest in pursuing a class 
action lawsuit on behalf of African Americans who can document how 
their families lost their land. Such a lawsuit should be filed, and it 
should be funded and supported by the United States Government.
  There are other instances in which blacks can prove that they have 
been victimized, with the government's blessing, because of their race. 
The case of Liberty Life Insurance Company comes to mind.
  I have never been more proud of my home State of South Carolina than 
I was a few weeks ago when the State Insurance Commission fined this 
Greenville, South Carolina-based company $2 million and suspended its 
license to sell insurance for at least 1 year because they charged 
black citizens higher premiums than they did whites. This was a common 
practice from the 1930s through the 1950s and was done with State 
regulators' knowledge and approval. Some of those policies remain in 
effect today, and the higher premiums were still being collected 
through the end of last year. Liberty Life was not alone in this 
practice, and there are many other insurance companies that must make 
restitution for these egregious actions. The time has come for other 
State governments to act and maybe the Federal Government as well.
  I think the chances are very slim that African Americans will ever 
receive reparations for the ills wrought by slavery, at least in the 
traditional sense.
  Trying to prove definitive ancestral links between contemporary 
African Americans and slaves going back nearly four centuries will, in 
most cases, be fruitless. Unlike holocaust survivors or Japanese 
Americans who were interned during World War II, there are few reliable 
records on slaves brought to America. Instead, I urge African Americans 
all across this country to begin gathering evidence about State-
sanctioned discriminatory practices like land-takings and insurance 
overcharges. These are battles we can fight now, and the Congressional 
Black Caucus is committed to helping them win.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to now yield the floor to the distinguished 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton).


                ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE SPEAKER PRO TEMPORE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Illinois).
  Without objection, the gentlewoman from North Carolina will control 
the remainder of the hour.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from South 
Carolina for his leadership and for joining with me and in calling this 
Special

[[Page 677]]

Order. A number of our colleagues will join us and participate. We are 
honored to have the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt), and I 
will yield to him now.
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for 
yielding time to me to make a statement regarding a matter that I 
regard as a problem of epidemic proportions. I want to thank the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) and the gentleman from 
South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) for organizing this Special Order to deal 
with a very, very serious problem.
  The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) has approached this 
from an historical perspective, and I admire him for doing that. There 
are many, many, many instances of just absolute overt, fraudulent, or 
scheming, or illegal takings of property that can be documented 
throughout the annals of history, takings of property from African 
American families who had struggled and worked so hard to acquire 
property. I subscribe to the gentleman's belief that those issues can 
be addressed and should be addressed and identified and addressed 
through legal action, and I hope that Professor Ogletree and other 
members of the legal profession will proceed with efforts to do that.
  There perhaps is not, except for slavery itself and the deprivation 
of voting rights of African Americans, not a greater epidemic or 
problem than the loss of land, particularly in the South, from African 
American ownership. It is estimated that at one point in our history, 
African Americans owned approximately 15 million acres of land in the 
South. The estimates now indicate that that land ownership is down to 
approximately 2 million acres.
  Now, there are many reasons for that, and the gentleman from South 
Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) has identified the overt historical reasons for 
it, but in addition to that, and this is where I want to pick up and 
bring it on up to date in a slightly different context so that we 
understand fully the issues that we are involved with, in addition to 
direct taking of property, swindling, fraudulent taking, intimidation 
of landowners and their families so that they would leave their 
property behind, and that property then being claimed by members of the 
majority race, there are other things that have contributed to this, 
and I want to talk about some of them.
  They, on their face, do not always seem like they are racially 
motivated. I want to be careful to say that these are not racist plots 
that I am talking about; they are race-neutral in their application, 
but they are not race-neutral in the impact that they have. They have a 
disparate impact on black land ownership. I want to talk about a few of 
those.
  First of all, there is this concept of eminent domain. That is a 
race-neutral principle that the government uses to acquire property for 
public purposes. But historically, if one goes back and looks, eminent 
domain has been used disproportionately to deprive black landowners of 
their property than it has been used to deprive white landowners of 
their property. The reason for that is that typically, property that 
has been owned by black landowners has been lower in value. When the 
government needs to take property for a public purpose, it wants to 
spend as little money as it can spend to accomplish that public 
purpose, so they go and try to acquire the land that has the lowest 
economic value. Or, the government will say, well, if we go to a 
certain section of town and start to acquire property, then we will 
meet with greater political opposition, so we should go through the 
parts of the community where we will get the least amount of political 
resistance.
  So it is not accidental that when one drives down an interstate 
highway, many of those interstate highways go from city to city to 
city, but one of the things that they have in common is that they 
typically go through minority communities, splitting them right in half 
in many instances. The reason for that is because property values were 
lower in those communities where the acquisitions were being made, and 
that was the course of the least political resistance to the taking.
  So eminent domain, a race-neutral concept, has a racially disparate 
impact, and that has been a method by which black landowners have been 
deprived of land.
  The whole concept of heir property and partition of property, again, 
is a race-neutral principle that in its application has a disparate 
impact on minority landownership. Minority families have historically 
had larger families. Many of them have left the South; the kids have 
left the South, gone to the North, spread out all over the country, and 
when their parents die, they die without a will, and the land becomes 
heir property. We have 10 children that become owners, none of them 
have real ownership because they do not have any real connection to the 
property, so there are disputes that develop about whether the property 
gets divided. Typically it does not get divided, it gets sold to people 
who will pay lesser value for it. Or it gets sold because the taxing 
authorities take it and sell it. Because 10 people have an interest in 
the property, no single one of them wants to assume the burden of 
paying the taxes on that property.
  I daresay that there is not a Member of the Congressional Black 
Caucus who does not have some history in their own family or in their 
community of people who have been deprived of ownership of land in this 
way, through heir property, through lack of wills, through eminent 
domain, through partition actions that turned out to be sales actions, 
and the beat goes on.
  So how do we get from 15 million acres of land owned by minorities in 
the South down to 2 million acres? We have overt, racist, intimidating 
acts of the kind that the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) 
described, and we have race-neutral, innocent-sounding acts like 
eminent domain and partition and tax sales that have a racially 
disparate impact on land ownership.
  What the Congressional Black Caucus is intent on doing is trying to 
bring more attention to this; trying to educate the public that that is 
a problem of epidemic proportions, so that minority individuals 
understand the value of land. When I was growing up, when I got a 
little bit older, my parents used to say to me, land is the only 
commodity that the Lord is not going to make any more of. There will 
not be any more land made. So when you lose land, you have lost 
something of value. So we are trying to get that message out to the 
public in African American communities, and we are trying to understand 
and let other people understand the epidemic proportions of what we are 
about.
  I think we have the historical part of it now and the present-day 
part of it, and I am sure there are many other aspects to this, but 
there are other people here to talk about them. So I want to yield back 
to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton). I want to thank 
her and my colleague, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) 
again, for reserving this time so that we can shine a light on this 
problem that has epidemic proportions in this country, in the history 
of this country, and even continuing today in sinister ways that people 
do not understand.

                              {time}  1930

  Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from North 
Carolina (Mr. Watt) and thank him for his sharing of knowledge. It does 
not have to be overt. Again, there are areas that are neutral that have 
devastating impact on minority communities: the issue of eminent 
domain, the issue of petitioning, the issue of sales. All of those fine 
ways of dispossessing or taking wealth away from people who they 
thought otherwise would have it. I do thank him for sharing that with 
us.
  We are joined by someone who is a strong advocate for these issues. 
He has been an associate in the battlefield, the gentleman from the 
great State of Mississippi (Mr. Thompson).
  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman 
from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton).
  I join the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt) and the gentleman

[[Page 678]]

from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) in this effort to bring to this 
country's attention the serious problem associated with black land loss 
in America.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about land loss in the black 
community. A recent Associated Press investigative report titled ``Torn 
From the Land'' documented how land has been unjustly taken from 
African Americans over the years and alerted the world to the alarming 
declining trend in black land ownership. America's seventh President, 
Andrew Jackson, said in his July 10, 1832, bank veto message to the 
United States Senate, ``Every man is entitled to protection by laws. 
But when the laws undertake to add artificial distinctions, to grant 
titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer 
and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society, the 
farmers, mechanics, and laborers, who have neither the time nor the 
means for securing like favor to themselves, have a right to complain 
of the injustice of their government.''
  Unfortunately, at the time these words were uttered they were not 
applicable to African Americans. However, even Andrew Jackson, a white 
Southern aristocrat and slave owner himself, realized that in order for 
this Nation to be a great place, our Nation's resources must be equally 
distributed among all classes of Americans. And also he knew the 
importance of all individuals having the means to file and advocate 
grievances against the government when they felt they have been dealt 
an injustice.
  Since Reconstruction, the plight of African Americans is by far no 
secret. It is a disgraceful past that has undoubtedly tarnished 
America's rich history. All of her life Ms. Delores Barclay, currently 
an AP reporter, heard random stories from blacks that went along the 
lines of, ``My grandparents had some land but we do not know what 
happened to it.'' After hearing stories of this nature time and again, 
Ms. Barclay decided that perhaps she should just not dismiss them as 
they had in the past as some sort of mysterious urban legend; but 
instead she took and looked into these claims to see if they could be 
substantiated. She decided to team up with a few colleagues; and thanks 
to their hard work and dedication to uncovering the truth, what 
followed was an investigation which covered an 18-month period 
including interviews with more than 1,000 people and the examination of 
tens of thousands of old fragile public records.
  The results of this investigation, Mr. Speaker, should disturb all 
Americans. The investigation documented 107 land takings in 13 Southern 
and border States. In those cases alone, 406 black land owners lost 
more than 24,000 acres of farm and timber land, plus 85 smaller 
properties including stores and city lots valued at tens of millions of 
dollars.
  How did these injustices happen? Most of these land-takings occurred 
in the decade between Reconstruction and the civil rights struggle when 
black families were powerless to prevent them, a time when black 
families could not drink from the same water fountains as whites and 
the fear of being lynched was always present. More than half of these 
cases, the Associated Press documented, 57 to be exact, were violent 
land-takings where black land owners were attacked by whites who just 
wanted to drive them off their land. In other cases, trickery, legal 
manipulations, and discriminatory lending practices can be attributed 
to land losses suffered by black families.
  Imagine yourself as a black farmer in Mississippi in the 1950's or 
1960's. You own some of the best agriculture land in the State. What 
you do not have, however, is the cash needed to plant and harvest this 
year's crop. What do you do? Well, you do what many Americans do when 
they need money for their businesses, you borrow it. But suppose the 
local banks and the Farmers Home Administration do not particularly 
care for your lending or want to lend you money. You are left with one 
choice. To finance your business you go to a prominent businessman in 
the community and ask for money. In return for the loan, however, you 
are required to put up the entire farm as collateral.

  At harvest, the crop prices are low and you come up short on paying 
off your loan and the lender forecloses and takes your entire farm. The 
farm that you planned to pass on to your children is lost. The scenario 
I just described, Mr. Speaker, was not unusual in the South during the 
1950's and 1960's. The Associated Press documented eight cases where 
land was acquired in this very manner by single prominent businessmen. 
This particular individual acquired nearly 700 acres of black-owned 
land in exchange for used pickups and farm equipment.
  Mr. Speaker, for those that have lost land, that have lost so much 
more than simply monetary value of this land, they have lost the 
availability to pass down such a valuable asset to future generations. 
Land ownership is the ladder to respect and prosperity, the means to 
building an economic security and passing wealth on to the next 
generations. For those black families that have lost that land, they 
have lost all of this. And for those black Americans that are being 
repressed from becoming land owners, they are being robbed of the 
American dream. I sincerely hope all Americans become aware of these 
injustices and do what they can individually and collectively to right 
this wrong.
  Mr. Speaker, I compliment the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. 
Clayton) again on getting this time to highlight this important issue.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Hilliard) 
is a member of the Committee on Agriculture and has been a strong 
advocate for wealth accumulation and for protection of land and 
agriculture needs, and we are delighted to have him join us.
  Mr. HILLIARD. Mr. Speaker, let me first of all congratulate the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) for this colloquy and 
for putting this together.
  It is very important that we realize, Mr. Speaker, that historically 
blacks have had their lands taken by many different individuals and by 
corporations and, of course, by government. Our attention primarily 
during this colloquy is focused on the taking of the land by 
government. And it is not just the local government we speak of, but 
land is taken by many governments, cities, towns, counties, and, of 
course, our States. Generally, it is taken by the use of two vehicles. 
The first one is eminent domain.
  Primarily, eminent domain is a legal term in which the State, the 
city or the county has the right to acquire lands for public use or for 
public purposes; but in the law it states public use. That means for 
some use like sewers, perhaps, or for some type of facility that 
benefits the entity itself, the building of city hall, some school or 
some library. That is public use. Unfortunately, many States, cities, 
and counties have used eminent domain in such a way as to deprive 
blacks and African Americans of their lands in so-called legal ways or 
in a legal instance.
  Unfortunately, we look at the situation now as we speak, we find that 
in Mississippi land is being taken under the guise of eminent domain 
from farmers now. And the use of the property will be to build a Nissan 
plant. Well, that is not public use. That is private use. So African 
Americans' land at this time as we speak is being taken for private use 
under the guise of eminent domain.
  The second way in which government takes property is through the 
process of tax reassessment. And in many instances the property taxes 
are run up to the extent that it is very difficult for the individuals 
to pay. Let me give you an example. In many coastal areas in South 
Carolina, in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi blacks own land. And 
during the early 1970's and 1980's the coastal lands, for whatever 
reason, became very popular; and they started building hotels, 
restaurants and other types of facilities in the so-called resort 
areas, and of course, what happened?
  Whenever anything new was built, the surrounding property would be 
reevaluated and taxes would be assessed based upon whatever is there, a 
hotel, a restaurant or whatever it is. And of course that would make 
the taxes very

[[Page 679]]

expensive. So we realize that situation in Alabama. So we came up with 
the theory of current use, and we said that land should be taxed not at 
the surrounding values of other land but the current use.
  The reason why we came up with that is because we had to protect not 
only African Americans but even poor whites. Unless we correct the 
situation that is inherent in our laws, we will find that it not only 
affects African Americans but that it affects other Americans. Freedom 
is not free unless it extends to everyone everywhere. If for one minute 
we let our guard down, if for one minute we let anyone take advantage 
of anyone else, pretty soon they will take advantage of us.
  Mr. Speaker, it is incumbent upon us as legislators to do our job and 
to make sure we redefine legal terms so that they will be expressive of 
the rights of people and so that people will understand fully what 
their rights are so that they may protect them.
  Let me again thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. 
Clayton).
  Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for bringing that 
information, and I also just want to ask him to restate the actions of 
Alabama recently. I gather that is a recent decision, that they have 
now decided to make sure that the value of land is the current use 
rather than the traditional use?
  Mr. HILLIARD. No, current use rather than the value of surrounding 
lands.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. Surrounding land. Is that recent?
  Mr. HILLIARD. That is the law currently.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. When did that happen?
  Mr. HILLIARD. When I was in the Alabama House of Representatives, 
somewhere in the late 1970's, somewhere around 1978, 1979.
  Let me say this, that is very important because as we find our 
suburban areas expanding, in many instances shopping centers are built 
3 and 4 miles outside of the city or outside of the suburban area 
surrounded by a wooden area, by woods, trees or by farms.

                              {time}  1945

  If you really evaluate the farmland based upon what it is near, of 
course it is going to carry the value of the shopping center, and of 
course the farmers do not make the kind of money that the shopping 
centers do. So they do not have the opportunity, the farmers, to pay 
those kind of taxes, and that is one way, through a reassessment, that 
land has been taken in the past by government.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. I thank the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Hilliard) for 
sharing that with us and making that clear in terms of what the State 
of Alabama has done.


                             General Leave

  Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members 
may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their 
remarks on this special order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Illinois). Is there objection 
to the request of the gentlewoman from North Carolina?
  There was no objection.
  Mrs. CLAYTON. Mr. Speaker, we are raising the issue tonight of land 
loss by Afro-Americans or blacks, and this issue was raised to us as a 
result of the AP series. The AP series was a 3-part, 10-article series 
plus graphics. It was published in December, and it was published all 
across the United States. Many of us knew that this was happening, but 
because this had such wide distribution, the gentleman from South 
Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) brought to our attention that this was an 
opportunity to raise this issue in a concerted way.
  This issue is not just confined to Afro-Americans or blacks who live 
in the South; as the series articles clearly stated, that those who 
lived in the North had no guarantee that their lands would not be 
taken, also.
  So what are we talking about? What is this all about? This is about 
raising the consciousness that historically there has been a practice 
overtly, in some ways benignly, both through illegal means and through 
legal means, the taking of land.
  My colleagues heard the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watts) and 
the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Hilliard) talk about the color of law, 
that it is not necessarily racial, it is not illegal in terms of 
petitioning. It is not illegal in terms of eminent domain, it is the 
application of that. So the color of law, even those things that are 
within our legal system has an impact of moving or dispossessing 
citizens, and Afro-Americans particularly, from their land.
  Why is this important? Well, land is wealth. The dignity of owning a 
piece of land or owning a home is what defines a person and his family, 
of owning something that his family can share. In the rural South 
owning land not only allowed someone to have their plot of land, but 
allowed someone, if they were a farmer, to produce and make income on 
the land. So the land not only was a place of pride and citizenship and 
respectability, but also was a source of income.
  We heard reference to the fact that our own records show in U.S. 
agriculture that we owned over 15 million acres of land and actually 
own something less than 2 million acres of land now. What has happened? 
That has not just been a shift of land through legal means. Those have 
also been through illegal means. It means that from 15 million acres 
now to 2 million or less than 2 million acres, the same amount of, even 
more, have less. So the wealth has been reduced to a very minimum.
  We have very small plots of lands, farmers trying to subsist. They 
are trying to use that land to be a productive source of income.
  So it is important that we understand that the taking of the land is 
not only a historical event. We are very appreciative of the AP series. 
Mr. Speaker, I also enter into the Record additional articles that the 
AP press has published.

                     Black Farmers: A Vanishing Way

       By 1910, black Americans had amassed more land than at any 
     other time in this country's history--at least 15 million 
     acres, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Black owned 
     farms, however, tended to be undercounted because the census 
     tallied only larger farms that were producing crops. Black 
     landownership tapered off after World War I, and plunged in 
     the 1950s. Today, blacks are full owners of just 1.1 million 
     of the more than 1 billion acres of arable land in the United 
     States.
                                  ____


                          History Up in Smoke

       Any investigation relying on historical land records in the 
     South is complicated by the widespread loss of documents 
     stored in county courthouses. Storms, floods and neglect have 
     taken their toll on these collections of deeds, tax records 
     and estate papers. But fires--both accidental and 
     intentional--have caused the most damage to these 
     repositories of land history, since the mid-1800s.
                                  ____


                           The Lynching Trail

       Racial violence in America is a well-told story. But the 
     importance of land as a motive for lynchings has gone largely 
     overlooked. Historians say prosperous blacks--and black 
     landowners--often became targets of white lynch mobs, whose 
     attacks could trigger an exodus of blacks. ``If you are 
     looking for stolen black land,'' says Ray Winbush, director 
     of Fisk University's Race Relations Institute, ``just follow 
     the lynching trail.'' More than 3,000 blacks were lynched 
     between 1865 and 1965, according to the Tuskegee Institute 
     and the NAACP. This map shows lynchings confirmed by 
     researchers who worked from a list begun by the Chicago 
     Tribune in 1882, and later expanded upon by the NAACP and 
     Tuskegee.
                                  ____


Developers and Lawyers Use a Legal Maneuver To Strip Black Families of 
                                  Land

                  (By Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay)

       Lawyers and real estate traders are stripping Americans of 
     their ancestral land today, simply by following the law.
       It is done through a court procedure that is intended to 
     help resolve land disputes but is being used to pry land from 
     people who do not want to sell.
       Black families are especially vulnerable to it. The 
     Becketts, for example, lost a 335-acre farm in Jasper County, 
     S.C., that had been in their family since 1873. And the 
     Sanders clan watched helplessly as a timber company recently 
     acquired 300 acres in Pickens County, Ala., that had been in 
     their family since 1919.
       The procedure is called partitioning, and this is how it 
     works:
       Whenever a landowner dies without a will, the heirs--
     usually spouse and children--inherit the estate. They own the 
     land in common, with no one person owning a specific part of 
     it. If more family members die without wills, things can get 
     messy within a couple of generations, with dozens of 
     relatives owning the land in common.

[[Page 680]]

       Anyone can buy an interest in one of these family estates; 
     all it takes is a single heir willing to sell. And anyone who 
     owns a share, no matter how small, can go to a judge and 
     request that the entire property be sold at auction.
       Some land traders seek out such estates and buy small 
     shares with the intention of forcing auctions. Family members 
     seldom have enough money to compete, even when the high bid 
     is less than market value.
       ``Imagine buying one share of Coca-Cola and being able to 
     go to court and demand a sale of the entire company,'' said 
     Thomas Mitchell, a University of Wisconsin law professor who 
     has studied partitioning. ``That's what's going on here.''
       This can happen to anyone who owns land in common with 
     others; laws allowing partition sales exist in every state.
       However, government and university studies show black 
     landowners in the South are especially vulnerable because up 
     to 83 percent of them do not leave wills--perhaps because 
     rural blacks often lack equal access to the legal system.
       Mitchell and others who have studied black landownership 
     estimate that thousands of black families have lost millions 
     of acres through partition sales in the last 30 years.
       ``It's the all-time, slam-dunk method of separating blacks 
     and their land,'' said Jerry Pennick, a regional coordinator 
     for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which provides 
     technical and legal support to black farmers.
       By the end of the 1960s, civil rights legislation and 
     social change had curbed the intimidation and violence that 
     had driven many blacks from their land over the previous 100 
     years. Nevertheless, black land loss did not stop.
       Since 1969, the decline has been particularly steep. Black 
     Americans have lost 80 percent of the 5.5 million acres of 
     farmland they owned in the South 32 years ago, according to 
     the U.S. Agricultural Census.
       Partition sales, Pennick estimates, account for half of 
     those losses.
       A judge is not required to order a partition sale just 
     because someone requests it. Often, there are other options.
       When the property is large enough for each owner to be 
     given a useful parcel, it can be fairly divided. When those 
     who want to keep the land outnumber those who want to sell, 
     the court can help the majority arrange to buy out the 
     minority. In at least one state, Alabama, the law gives 
     family members first rights to buy out anyone who wants to 
     sell.
       Yet, government and university studies show, alternatives 
     to partition sales are rarely considered. When partition 
     sales are requested, judges nearly always order them.
       ``Judges order partition sales because it's easy,'' said 
     Jesse Dukeminier, an emeritus professor of law at the 
     University of California at Los Angeles. Appraising and 
     dividing property takes time and effort, he said.
       Partition statutes exist for a reason: to help families 
     resolve impossible tangles that can develop when land is 
     passed down through several generations without wills.
       In Rankin County, Miss., for example, the 66 heirs to an 
     80-acre black family estate could not agree on what to do 
     with the land. One family member, whose portion was the size 
     of a house lot, wanted her share separate from the estate. 
     Three other heirs, who owned shares the size of parking 
     spaces, opposed dividing the land because what they owned 
     would have become worthless. So, in 1979, the court ordered 
     the land sold and the proceeds divided.
       Even when the process works as intended, it contributes to 
     the decline in black-owned land; the property nearly always 
     ends up in the hands of white developers or corporations. The 
     Rankin County land was bought at auction by a timber company.
       But the process doesn't always work as intended. Land 
     traders who buy shares of estates with the intention of 
     forcing partition sales are abusing the law, according to a 
     1985 Commerce Department study.
       The practice is legal but ``clearly unscrupulous,'' 
     declared the study, which was conducted for the department by 
     the Emergency Land Fund, a nonprofit group that helped 
     Southern blacks retain threatened land in the 1970s and '80s.
       Blacks have lost land through partitioning for decades; the 
     AP found several cases in the 1950s. But in recent years, it 
     has become big business. Legal fees for bringing partition 
     actions can be high--often 20 percent of the proceeds from 
     the land sales. Families, in effect, end up paying the fees 
     of the lawyers who separate them from their land.
       Moreover, black landowners cannot always count on their own 
     lawyers. Sometimes, the Commerce Department study found, 
     attorneys representing blacks filed partition actions that 
     were against their client's interests.
       The AP found several cases in which black landowners, 
     unfamiliar with property law, inadvertently set partition 
     actions in motion by signing legal papers they did not 
     understand. Once the partition actions began, the landowners 
     found themselves powerless to stop them.
       The Associated Press studied 14 Partition cases in detail, 
     reviewing lawsuit files and interviewing participants. The 
     cases stretched across Southern and border states.
       Each case was different, each complicated, with some taking 
     years to resolve. In nearly every case, the partition action 
     was initiated by a land trader or lawyer rather then a family 
     member. In most cases, land traders bought small shares of 
     black family estates, sometimes from heirs who were elderly, 
     mentally disabled or in prison, and then sought partition 
     sales.
       All 14 estates were acquired from black families by whites 
     or corporations, usually at bargain prices.
       Migrations that have scattered black families increase 
     their vulnerability to partition actions. Historians say 
     those who fled the South seldom spoke of the lives they left 
     behind. Their descendants may not realize they have inherited 
     small shares of family property and have no attachment to the 
     land. All a land trader has to do is find one of them.
       Some families have hired attorneys and tried to fight back. 
     However, said Mitchell, the Wisconsin law professor, ``the 
     families nearly always lost.''
       To understand how partition sales work in practice, it is 
     useful to begin with a relatively simple one.
       The case of the Marsh family of Northern Louisiana contains 
     the three typical elements: land passed down without wills, 
     black landowners unfamiliar with property law and a white 
     businessman who saw an opportunity and took it. But it has 
     few of the complications that can make partition cases 
     difficult to allow.
       Louis Marsh, a freed slave, accumulated 560 acres in 
     Jackson Parish in the decades after the Civil War. When he 
     died without a will in 1906, his children inherited the land. 
     They owned it in common until 1944, when they asked the court 
     to divide it.
       The Court gave six siblings 80 acres each, court records 
     show. The final 80 acres would have gone to their brother, 
     Kern Marsh, but he had fled Louisiana after killing a man. 
     So, the court decided, Louise Marsha's children would 
     continue to own that share in common.
       With the family's permission, one of the siblings, Albert 
     Marsh, farmed those extra 80 acres along with his own share. 
     As 20 years passed with no sign of Kern Marsh, the family 
     care to think of all 160 of those acres as Albert Marsh's 
     land. Family members said they expected it would be passed 
     down to Albert's children when he died.
       That's not what happened.
       On April 11, 1955, about the time oil rings were appearing 
     on neighboring property, Albert Marsh died without a will. 
     Not long after, a white oil man named J.B. Holstead purchased 
     an 11.4-acre interest in the extra 80 acres. The seller was 
     one of Albert Marsh's nephews, Leon Elmore, who was one of 
     Albert Marsh's nephews, Leon Elmore, who has since died.
       The deed, filed on Aug. 13, 1955 says Elmore was paid $100 
     cash and other consideration--a used truck, according to 
     Elmore's son, Leon, Jr.
       Three days later, Holstead filed for a partition sale of 
     the 80 acres.
       Six days after that, a judge sorted out who owned shares in 
     the 80 acres. Because the 1944 partition had left that land 
     as common property of Louis Marsh's children, the true owners 
     were his 23 living descendants, the judge decided. Leon 
     Elmore was among them, giving him the right to sell his share 
     to Holstead.
       The Marshes did not understand what was happening and did 
     not have a lawyer, said Albert Marsh's son, Alvie, 86. 
     Besides, he said, challenging a white businessman in the 
     1950's ``never entered your mind--'less you wanted the 
     rope.''
       On Nov. 15, 1955, the same judge granted Holstead's request 
     for a partition sale. Court costs, plus a $250 fee to 
     Holstead's lawyer, were to be paid from the proceeds.
       At the Jan. 21, 1956, auction, Holstead bought the 80 acres 
     for $6,400. He quickly sold the land and the oil and gas 
     rights for unspecified amounts, records show.
       The land changed hands several times before being acquired 
     in 1996 by Williamette Industries Inc., a wood-products 
     company. A company spokeswoman said Williamette was unaware 
     of the land's history.
       Holstead is dead; his son, John Holstead, a Houston lawyer, 
     said he was unaware of the case. When it was described to 
     him, he said: ``All of the legal procedures of Louisiana law 
     were followed.''
       Alvie Marsh believes that land was taken unfairly. ``I've 
     lived with that for 45 years;'' he said.
       Today, he lives in a shack on that part of the estate his 
     family was able to keep.
       Things were more complicated when a South Carolina real 
     estate trader went after two tracts owned by different 
     branches of the Beckett family in the 1990s.
       In 1990, Audrey Moffitt sought a 335-acre estate in Jasper 
     County, S.C., that had been owned by the family since 1873.
       Frances Beckett, a 74-year-old widow with a fourth-grade 
     education, was one of 76 heirs to the estate. According to 
     court papers, she was bedridden with cancer; her doctor had 
     given her three months to live.
       The dying women accepted Moffitt's offer of $750 for her 1/
     72 interest--worth $4,653, according to a subsequent 
     appraisal by J. Edward Gay, a real estate consultant. An 
     appeals court would later call it the only ``true'' appraisal 
     of the property.

[[Page 681]]

       Moffitt then bought out six others heirs for a total of 
     $6,600, court papers show.
       Among them, she paid Edward Stewart, 88, a man with no 
     formal education, and Flemon Woods, 80, with a third-grade 
     education, a combined $5,800 for their one-sixth interest. It 
     was worth $55,833, according to Gay's appraisal.
       Moffitt filed her partition action in January 1991. Beckett 
     family members counter-sued, alleging Moffitt had secured the 
     elderly heirs' signatures without the presence of a notary. A 
     special referee in the Court of Common Pleas ruled that the 
     estate be sold.
       The property was broken into two pieces that were auctioned 
     separately. Fifty acres were purchased for $75,000 at a 
     December 1991 sale by John Rhodes, a real estate broker from 
     nearby Estill, and his mother, Florence. Of this, $12,864 
     went to Moffitt for her shares and nearly $20,000 was taken 
     for court costs, leaving $42,331 for the family.
       Today, Rhodes and his siblings own the tract, which is 
     assessed at $200,000. Moffitt bought the remaining 285 acres 
     for $146,000 in February 1992. (That included $24,338 she 
     paid to herself for her own shares.)
       Two years later, however, an appeals court ruled that the 
     signatures of the elderly Beckett heirs were obtained 
     illegally. The court also cited uncontested evidence that 
     Moffitt or her partner had led Edward Stewart to believe he 
     was selling a right of way, led Frances Beckett to believe 
     she was selling timber rights and led Flemon Woods to believe 
     he would be liable for substantial back taxes if he did not 
     sell.
       The court characterized Moffitt's dealings with the three 
     elderly family members as ``unconscionable.'' When Moffitt 
     paid an additional $45,075 for the shares, however, the court 
     validated the partition sale.
       With the additional payment, Moffitt's outlay for the land 
     totaled $198,425, court papers show. Deduct the $37,202 she 
     received from the partition sales for her own shares of the 
     estate, and her true outlay was $161,223.
       Moffitt has since broken up the property and resold it to a 
     locally prominent family and several area businesses, 
     property records show. In one transaction, she swapped part 
     of the old Beckett land for an adjoining piece of property, 
     which she then sold.
       Her proceeds from these sales, property records show, total 
     $1,708,117--nearly 11 times what she paid for the property.
       ``They basically just ran these people out,'' said Bernard 
     Wilburn, an Ohio lawyer who represented several Beckett 
     heirs.
       This wasn't the only time the Becketts encountered Moffitt.
       In 1991, she paid heirs on another side of the family 
     $2,775 or a one-fifth interest in 50 acres of undeveloped 
     land along State Highway 170 in Beaufort County, S.C.--the 
     main link between Savannah, Ga., and the resort island of 
     Hilton Head. The following year, Moffitt filed for partition, 
     forcing the 42 heirs into court.
       The family knew what was coming because of what was 
     happening to their relatives, so they negotiated a 
     settlement. They allowed Moffitt to pick out the best 10.4 
     acres of the estate in return for dropping the partition 
     action.
       Moffitt didn't keep the land long. Records show that in 
     October 1998 the state paid her $17,000 for a roadway 
     easement of less than an acre. In January 1999, she sold the 
     rest to a Methodist church for $200,000.
       In all, she received $217,000 for land she had purchased 
     for $2,775.
       ``You can't buck these big-money developers,'' said family 
     member William Jackson, a retired math teacher. ``You are 
     most times forced to settle for less than what your property 
     is worth.''
       Moffitt, of Varnville, S.C., did not return phone calls but 
     replied in writing to a letter requesting comment. Apparently 
     limiting her remarks to the larger Beckett property, she 
     defended the dealings described as ``unconscionable'' by the 
     court, calling her payments to the elderly Beckett's ``fair 
     value.''
       She characterized the Beckett ownership as ``a convoluted 
     mess'' that made the land unmarketable. She added: ``The 
     heirs could have done for themselves what I did, but for 
     generations had not done so. It is difficult sometimes to get 
     two people to agree; getting 30 or 40 or more people all to 
     agree to sell or keep and use their property would be 
     virtually impossible, in my experience.
       More complicated still is the story of the Sanders estate 
     in Pickens County, Ala.
       M.L. Wheat of Millport, Ala., wanted to buy the 300 acres 
     of timberland that had been in the Sanders family for 83 
     years. In early 1996, he talked price with one of the owners, 
     Ivene Sanders. They met in the office of Wheat's lawyer, 
     William D. King IV. When Wheat learned that buying the land 
     would require reaching agreement with about 100 heirs, he 
     backed away from the deal.
       Then, in May of that year, the story took a turn.
       King, who had represented Wheat, filed a partition action 
     on behalf of 35 members of the Sanders family, naming other 
     heirs as defendants.
       Only two family members signed the complaint seeking the 
     sale: Ivene Sanders, now 72, with a fourth-grade education, 
     and his cousin, Archie Sanders, now 75, with a third-grade 
     education. Court papers show both later insisted they did not 
     understand what they were signing.
       Ivene Sanders told the AP he thought he was authorizing 
     King only to determine the size of each family member's 
     share.
       Several family members King listed as plaintiffs turned out 
     not to own shares. All but five of the plaintiffs who did own 
     shares joined Ivene and Archie Sanders in filing papers 
     stating that they had not authorized King to pursue the 
     partition action.
       Several hired another lawyer to try to stop the sale.
       The AP could find nothing in the record indicating the 
     wishes of the other five plaintiffs. One, Emma Jeann Sanders, 
     told the AP she had never hired King. Another, Lillie Velma 
     Gregory, was too ill to be interviewed, but her daughter, 
     Fentris Miller Hayes, said her mother had not hired King. 
     Another is now dead. The other two could not be located.
       Whose interest was King representing as he pursued the 
     partition action for more than two years? King would not 
     comment beyond saying that the record speaks for itself.
       As the case went on, the number of family members being 
     sued to force the sale reached 78. Of these, 18 did not 
     object to the sale, according to the judge. In fact, in the 
     case's final year, the judge decided that seven of them were 
     no longer defendants, but plaintiffs.
       Five of those seven then filed objections to the sale, too.
       Family members who took a position on the sale--plaintiffs 
     and defendants alike--were overwhelmingly opposed, court 
     records show. Some said they never wanted the family land 
     sold. Others, including Ivene and Archie Sanders, said that 
     if they were to sell, they would want to do so privately 
     rather than risk a low winning bid at a court-ordered 
     auction.
       Nevertheless, Circuit Court Judge James Moore ordered an 
     auction. The Melrose Timber Co., Inc., bought the property on 
     Nov. 24, 1998, for $505,000, court papers show.
       It was not a bad price, but the family did not get all the 
     money. King collected $104,730 in fees and expenses--about 20 
     percent of the sale proceeds. After court costs were 
     deducted, $389,170 remained to be divided among 96 heirs, 
     some of whom incurred thousands of dollars in legal fees 
     fighting the sale.
       Some family members wanted to appeal but decided they could 
     not afford the legal fees, said Ivene Sander's niece, Eldessa 
     Johnson, 50, of Southfield, Mich.
       King, reached at his Office in Carrollton, Ala., said: ``I 
     have no additional comments, other than what is in the 
     record. . . .  I have nothing to hide. This case has been 
     well litigated.''
       Moore said partitioning laws, intended to protect 
     landowners, are often used against them and may need 
     revision. However, he said, once the partition request was 
     filed, he approved it largely as a matter of routine.
       In his three-county rural circuit, he said, two or three 
     such cases are going on all the time. Most, he said, involve 
     black families.
                                  ____


 With Help From Their White Lawyer, a Black Mississippi Family Loses a 
                                  Farm

                            (By Todd Lewan)

       Carthage, Miss. (AP).--For years, Turf Smith lived alone in 
     a cabin in the woods, serving as caretaker of a 158-acre 
     estate shared by 25 family members who were scattered around 
     the country.
       He had long wanted to carve out 2 acres for himself to 
     build a new house, said two of his children, Quille and Gene 
     Smith. But, families being as they are, one of his relatives 
     would not agree.
       A white lawyer heard of Smith's plight, his children said. 
     The lawyer told the elderly black farmer he could help by 
     asking a judge to partition the property, giving family 
     members separate titles to their allotted shares. Smith, who 
     is now dead, agreed.
       However, the petition the lawyer filed on Turf Smith's 
     behalf asked the court to sell the entire estate at auction 
     if it could not be divided fairly among the heirs. The sale 
     of the entire estate, Smith's children said, was not 
     something he planned or imagined would happen.
       Court records show that many heirs to the property never 
     responded to the suit. The family, mostly rural folk, was 
     widely scattered, Quillie and Eugene Smith said. They didn't 
     understand what was happening or have the money to hire a 
     lawyer to fight it.
       The judge who heard the case appointed three special 
     commissioners to determine what should be done. County 
     records show that one of the panel members, Lynn O. Young, a 
     county forester who has since died, had numerous land 
     dealings with timber companies and a real estate speculator 
     named W.O. Sessums.
       The panel recommended a partition sale. Because not all of 
     the 158 acres were of the same quality, the land could not be 
     divided equally among the heirs, the panel told the court. 
     So, the judge ordered an auction.
       The sale was set for 1978. Turf Smith, with help from his 
     nephew, Maxwell Smith, scraped together $41,000 in cash and 
     loans to try to keep the land in the family, but they never 
     had a chance. Sessums quickly bid the price up and bought 156 
     of the 158 acres for $98,000, court records show.

[[Page 682]]

       Smith was able to buy the final 2 acres, which the court 
     sold separately for his benefit, for $1,200.
       Months later, Sessums sold his 156 acres for an undisclosed 
     sum to a subsidiary of Georgia Pacific Corp., property 
     records show.
       From the auction, each Smith heir received as little as 
     $245 to as much as $8,000, court records show. But the land 
     that had been their legacy since the early 1920s was gone.
       The property now is assessed at more than $225,000, and 
     believed to have a market value of much more because it has 
     quality hardwoods and shoulders a highway.
       ``We paid a fair market price and have clear title on the 
     land,'' Robin Keegan, a senior spokeswoman for Georgia 
     Pacific, said. ``Our records contain nothing to suggest that 
     anyone at Georgia Pacific knew anything about the family's 
     dispute over the land.''
       Sessums died three years ago, according to his wife, Mary. 
     She said Young routinely tipped her husband to land 
     opportunities. ``We bought some land through Lynn Young. He 
     bought several tracts like that at the courthouse, you know--
     commission.''
       Turf Smith died in 1981. Today, Quille Smith and her five 
     siblings own the land their father left them.
       ``Two acres,'' she said. ``That, and the history, is all we 
     have left.''

  Mrs. CLAYTON. We are very appreciative of them raising it all through 
the country, but we, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 
have an obligation to have Americans understand how important it is to 
own one's land, to own one's home place or homestead, what it means to 
the dignity of the family, and more than that, what it means to the 
sustainability of the community, what it means to the society, to make 
sure everyone feels that they have equal access to have a piece of the 
pie.
  The documents showed not only the take of land for eminent domain by 
governments, but also we found that it was a case in point where 
Mississippi, the burning of a courthouse, and all the documents were 
destroyed and a private entity came in and they claimed under color of 
law, and the lawyers in the audience would know more than I would, but 
they had a title that was not complete, where they went to court and 
they said there was no one else to claim this title. So for a period of 
years they had a color of title. Later, they acquired the land. They 
acquired the land for a very minimal amount of money.
  They sold that land after they discovered there was oil on that land, 
and even in the article it says the corporation now says the question 
is what do we do about this? He acknowledged there has been less than 
full disclosure, less than full legal remedy to the process, but he is 
the rightful owner.
  So there have been many acquisitions of lands and wealth and minerals 
from land that has been acquired as a result of the color of law and 
the result of some trickery. Obviously burning a courthouse is not the 
color of law.
  Also, we have eminent domain in Florida where the city acquired the 
land for a naval yard, acquired the land when people went there and 
begged that they indeed should have the opportunity to buy their land. 
Eminent domain said to the blacks that they had one price and to the 
whites right beside it a price that was at least 10 times higher. These 
family members tried to buy the land after the city had no use for the 
naval yard, and rather than sell it to them, they sold it to a baseball 
franchise. That baseball franchise bought that land for millions of 
dollars; not any remuneration to the Afro-American family members.
  History is replete with incidents where the color of law has been 
favoring those who are powerful and taking away without any opportunity 
of redress for those who are powerless or who were Afro-American who 
did not have the law of those who represented.
  I think the issue for us is not only to raise that consciousness of 
all Americans and understand the value of land, but also have a sense 
of fairness, have a sense of the value of having free access to the 
opportunity of being landowners or homeowners or sharing in the wealth, 
and to that extent, I think we will have a better America.
  I think also Afro-Americans are so worn that no one is as vigilant as 
they are themselves. They say buyer beware. So those who have been 
fraudulently offended, those who have had the color of law to take that 
land, they need to begin, I think, as the gentleman from South Carolina 
(Mr. Clyburn) challenged us, is to begin to think about bringing all 
that information together so we can share that information with the 
appropriate authority.
  I think we are setting the symbol, that it is the time for us to come 
together, first for America to come together and say this is 
unacceptable, it was not right then, and it certainly is not right now.
  Let me just finish my comments and say this is not just yesterday. 
This is still happening. I serve on the Committee on Agriculture, as 
two of my Representatives here, and we know that the black families had 
had a continuous complaint and legal action against the Department of 
Agriculture because they have had foreclosures or they have been 
discriminated in in getting the resources they have needed. So in the 
process of the loans, the foreclosure has meant that the taking of the 
land back to the government, when they were not able to either work out 
a payback schedule that would allow them to pay back their owns loans, 
or which they were lent moneys discriminately so they were not even 
given a chance in the very beginning to have an equal opportunity.
  So not only is this historical, it is continuing, and we as Americans 
should be alarmed at this. We should not find this as acceptable. I 
think it was Martin Luther King who said, it is not so much what bad 
people do, it is the silence of good people, and I know most Americans 
know that the taking of land, fraudulent or even by the color of law, 
is unacceptable, it is wrong. We ought to speak out at that.
  We are calling our colleagues and Americans to be engaged in this 
dialogue, and we are calling on black Americans themselves to be 
vigilant in making sure that they are taking care of their legal 
procedures, and they know the value of land, and they do not ignore 
notices about tax, notices for sale, and they do not take for granted 
someone else is going to take care of their business; that they 
understand that to own land is to be part of America, and they have 
every right to be engaged in it.
  Again, I am thankful and very appreciative that the gentleman from 
South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn) found this issue, something he 
passionately cared about and wanted to join us, and I know he may want 
to have some last remarks. I thank the gentleman from South Carolina 
(Mr. Clyburn) very much for doing this and yield to him.
  Mr. CLYBURN. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. 
Clayton) for joining me in this Special Order.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to say in closing the Special Order that I 
am pleased that the time has been granted. I want to sound the alarm to 
the public at large that this is an issue that has a long history. It 
is an issue that is very, very current in and around our neighborhoods 
today.
  In my own congressional district in South Carolina, I continue to 
find instances where people are now unable to pay taxes on the land 
that has been in their families for centuries simply because someone 
has built a motel or a housing development in the area, and all of a 
sudden the taxes have accelerated, and they are finding themselves 
unable to pay these taxes and, therefore, losing the land.
  We have seen that happen on Hilton Head, South Carolina; Daufuskie 
Island, South Carolina; Pawleys Island, South Carolina; all of these 
areas where there are resort communities being built. And so we bring 
this issue here today because we think it is high time that we begin to 
focus on what is being done under the color of law to people who find 
themselves powerless and to have big corporations like the 
International Paper Company now benefiting from this illegal taking. It 
is time for our government to join forces with large corporations. In 
this time when corporate scrutiny is very, very vigilant, we ought to 
do what is right by those people who had their land, their wealth taken 
away and now going to the benefit of people who have no legal right to 
it.

[[Page 683]]

  I want to thank my colleagues for joining me this evening in this 
Special Order.
  Mr. LEWIS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, many Americans have taken pride of 
our past and rightfully so. We have a rich history of working the land 
and having the opportunity to benefits from the fruits of our labor. My 
family has even had the opportunity to witness the pride that land 
ownership brings. In 1944, when I was only 4 years old, my father saved 
$300 to buy 100 acres of land in Alabama. This land has been in my 
family ever since, and to this day, my 87 year old mother still lives 
there. I cannot imagine, that in a country like ours, having this land 
stripped from under our feet without justification. Much less not even 
being able to do anything about it.
  Unfortunately, this was indeed the reality for many African American 
farmers at one time. It was often spoken of, but never proven. And 
until recently, many Black Farmers were crying on deaf ears of their 
plights. As Americans we have longed believed that under God, all men 
were created equal. Under this belief we all should have the 
fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 
However, for some, this was a far fetch dream. And to many, the pursuit 
of happiness was a down right lie!!!
  Few people know that by the turn of the 21st Century, former slaves 
and their descendants owned millions of acres of land. In fact by 1910, 
African Americans owned approximately 15 million acres of land. Today, 
African Americans own only 1.1 million acres of land.
  You might ask, why is it that during periods when our country 
witnessed massive prosperity and growth has the number of African 
American land ownership decreased so drastically? There are many 
answers to that question; however, probably the most disturbing one is 
the taking of land by White businessmen and lenders and keeping the 
unfortunate victims quiet, either through intimidation or murder. And 
today, land that was once owned by numerous hard working families is 
now home to baseball parks and shopping malls.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a shame!!! It is a shame that this was happening 
in America. It will be even more of a shame if we continue to let this 
be ignored.
  Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring to the nation's 
attention the plight of thousands of black farmers around the nation. 
From the day that we earned our freedom, many African-Americans have 
chosen to support themselves and their families through farming. And we 
pursued this profession with dedication and determination.
  Unfortunately, black farmers have faced opposition and intimidation 
from white farmers, Jim Crow laws, and the Federal Government. Local 
and state governments through the second half of the 1800s created laws 
that systematically stripped land from black farmers.
  The policy continued through the New Deal. President Roosevelt's much 
heralded policies which helped millions of people through those tough 
times, rarely helped black farmers despite the fact that they owned 
fourteen percent of the nation's farming land.
  Surprisingly, at a time when other blacks were achieving civil 
rights, the federal government pursued policies that made the condition 
of the black farmers worse. Thousands lost their land and, by 1978, 
tragically, there were only 6,996 black farms left. Today, there are 
fewer than 18,000 black farmers, which represents less than one percent 
of all the farms in America.
  These farmers worked their entire lives to get where they are today, 
and in many cases they are farming the same land as their grandparents 
and great-grandparents did. But due to unfair influences and the power 
of large corporations, these farmers are losing thousands of acres to 
development. What makes matters worse is that they are almost never 
given fair market value for their land.
  It is easy for many of us just to sweep this under the rug and 
pretend that nothing like this happened. But we must face the facts and 
realize that thousands of black farmers were systematically 
dispossessed from their land. I propose that the Federal Government 
create a commission so that farmers can have a free and fair forum to 
bring their complaints and reconcile this matter. Our farmers deserve 
nothing less.
  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to 
speak to the issue of Black Land Loss, an epidemic which is causing 
African Americans to lose land at alarming rates. This problem has 
plagued Black Americans for over a century and a half.
  We cannot allow an issue as pervasive and insidious as black land 
loss to go unaddressed. Black land loss is attributable to many 
reasons: lynchings, mob attacks, lack of legal wills, slick and 
untrustworthy lawyers, and unscrupulous real estate traders. Sometimes 
black land owners were attacked by whites who wanted to seize their 
property. During the Reconstruction period, blacks were ostracized, 
terrorized and dispossessed of the one thing they had managed to earn 
in that desperate time, their land.
  By 1920, African-Americans had amassed more land than they ever held 
since reconstruction, at least 15 million acres, according to 
statistics compiled by the U.S. Agricultural Census.
  Black land ownership tapered off after World War I and plunged in the 
1950's. Today, African-Americans own just 1.1 million acres of the more 
than 1 billion acres in productive land in the U.S. During the 20th 
Century Black Americans have lost their land holdings at a rate two and 
a half (2\1/2\) times faster than whites. Blacks were forced out of the 
South and off their land by:
  The discriminatory lending practices employed by banks and the U.S. 
Department of Agriculture; the need to seek better economic 
opportunities in the North; racial oppression; and violence perpetrated 
by white supremacist groups and other terrorist organizations. In 
effect, black landowners were put under so much pressure to give up 
their land, that they became refugees in their own country.
  Families that pass down their land without wills or with vague wills 
are particularly vulnerable to losing their property through 
partitioning and other predatory legal practices. Historically blacks 
in the rural south seldom left wills. Experts say thousands of acres of 
black owned land that had been in African-American families for 
generations has been lost through these practices. In recent years 
separating African-Americans from their land has become big business. 
All to the detriment of African-American land owners.
  Ownership of land has meant more than just a family homestead; land 
represented wealth to a black family, when these homesteads were taken 
from black families they lost their ability to pass on wealth. As 
W.E.B. DuBois stated, ``universal suffrage could not function without 
personal freedom, land and education.''
  By preventing blacks from preserving their land, whites were more 
able to perpetuate the vestiges of slavery. Taking land from African-
Americans went a long way in eliminating their ability to prosper; 
participate in the political process; and to effectively pass on wealth 
to future generations.
  Mr. CLAY. Mr. Speaker, I rise to commend the Associated Press for a 
series of articles it ran late last year entitled, ``Torn from the 
Land,'' which documented in great detail how private and government 
entities cheated many Black Americans out of their land or drove them 
from their land through intimidation, violence and murder.
  The misappropriation of these lands, undertaken primarily in the 
South, began more than a hundred years ago and continued well into the 
1960s.
  The lands and properties that were taken from African-Americans were 
generally small, such as a small home, a 40-acre farm or a modest 
business. But such losses were devastating to families and to a people 
struggling to overcome the legacy of slavery.
  According to the U.S. Agricultural Census, in 1910 African-Americans 
owned over 15 million acres of farmland, the greatest level of black 
landownership in our nation's history. However, as a result of the 
illegal land grabs and the discriminatory practices of the old Farmers 
Home Administration, black landownership today now stands at 1.1 
million acres.
  The wholesale theft of land from African-Americans is the greatest 
unpunished crime in our nation's sordid history of race relations.
  Landownership was the ladder to respectability and prosperity in the 
Old South--the primary means to building economic security and passing 
wealth on to the next generation. So when black families lost their 
land, they lost everything.
  Typically, blacks were forced off their lands with phony charges of 
nonpayment of taxes or through claims of counter ownership by other 
private or government entities.
  In other cases, African-Americans were forced off their lands with 
threats of violence or the outright murder of black landowners.
  In my home state of Missouri, hundreds of blacks fled the city of 
Springfield in 1906, after three men were lynched. The city, which at 
the time had a thriving African-American population of at least 10 
percent with many black doctors, lawyers and educators, is today only 
two percent black.
  In another case, 129 blacks abandoned land in Pierce City, Missouri 
after armed bands of whites burned five black-owned homes and killed 
four African-American men. Afterwards, whites bought up the previously 
black-owned land at bargain prices.

[[Page 684]]

  The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass foresaw this future tragedy 
for Black Americans when, on the 24th anniversary of the Emancipation 
Proclamation, he said, ``Where justice is denied, where poverty is 
enforced, where ignorance prevails, anywhere any one class is made to 
feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and 
degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.''
  The Associated Press articles provide ample empirical evidence that 
Congress needs to conduct a study into these tragic events to determine 
whether reparations for past losses are in order.
  Throughout our nation's history, there are many examples of our 
government taking steps to correct past wrongs committed against 
specific groups of Americans.
  We have compensated Japanese Americans for the time they were 
interned in concentration camps during World War II, and we have 
compensated Native Americans for the loss of their lands to western 
expansion.
  So now the time has come for us to examine the economic and physical 
losses suffered by African Americans under the old policies of Jim 
Crow. To do any less, would allow Justice to be denied.

                          ____________________