Prior to the Civil War, the Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state.

Mexican American war between the United States and Mexico (April 1846–February 1848) stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845.

Donation Land Claim Act of 1850

Expanded context:
These events set the legal and geographic foundations for white territorial expansion and racialized land exclusion. The Missouri Compromise not only determined the political balance of free and slave states but also reinforced a sectional map that confined Black people—free or enslaved—from accessing land in many territories. The Mexican-American War led to the U.S. acquisition of vast lands in the Southwest, most of which would be opened to white settlers. The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 granted free land in the Oregon Territory to white men and their families but explicitly barred Black settlers from ownership, even if they were free. These policies institutionalized land as a white entitlement and helped set the stage for later Black exclusion from homesteading, land grants, and rural ownership.

The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States from 1861 to 1865, fought between northern states loyal to the Union and southern states that had seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

Homestead Act of 1862

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While the Civil War disrupted the southern slave economy and eventually led to emancipation, the Homestead Act of 1862 redistributed 160-acre parcels of “public land” (much of it seized Indigenous territory) to white settlers. Although not legally race-restricted, in practice the Act excluded most Black Americans—particularly enslaved people or newly freed individuals—through discriminatory bureaucracy, lack of financial resources, and unsafe conditions in frontier regions. The land giveaway became one of the most powerful tools for building white generational wealth while leaving Black Americans landless at a critical turning point in U.S. history.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Forty acres and a mule is part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a post-Civil War promise proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, to allot family units, including freed people, a plot of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha). Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War.

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This was the closest the federal government came to reparative land redistribution. Sherman's Field Orders No. 15 temporarily set aside hundreds of thousands of acres for freed Black families on the Georgia and South Carolina coast. Many families settled and began farming. However, these promises were reversed within months by President Andrew Johnson, who returned the land to former Confederates. This abrupt revocation shattered hopes for economic self-determination and reestablished a racial hierarchy in landholding. The loss of this opportunity would haunt Black rural communities for generations, as they were pushed into sharecropping, tenant farming, and labor exploitation without a foothold in land ownership.

The Reconstruction era was the period in American history which lasted from 1863 to 1877. It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights.

Lincoln assassination – April 15, 1865, Petersen House, Washington, D.C.

13th amendment – Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

Southern Homestead Act of 1866 

KKK – Founded in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for Black Americans. 

Expanded context:
Reconstruction was both a high point and a turning point for Black land ownership. With the end of slavery and the passage of the 13th Amendment, some Black families began acquiring land independently or through modest federal reforms like the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, which released millions of acres for purchase in former Confederate states. Yet this opportunity was undercut by hostile local officials, financial barriers, and racist enforcement. Simultaneously, the emergence of white supremacist terror groups like the KKK violently targeted Black landowners, schools, and political leaders. The assassination of Lincoln and the shift toward leniency for former Confederates led to federal withdrawal from enforcing land and civil rights promises. This era marked both the highest rates of Black landholding (peaking around 14% of rural land in the U.S.) and the beginning of systematic rollback and loss.

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Oklahoma land grab - The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 was the first land rush into the Unassigned Lands. The area that was opened to settlement included all or part of the Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties of the US state of Oklahoma.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27–30, enacted April 9, 1866, was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the American Civil War, to protect the civil rights of persons of African descent born in or brought to the United States. This legislation was passed by Congress in 1865 and vetoed by United States President Andrew Johnson. In April 1866 Congress again passed the bill to support the Thirteenth Amendment.

Johnson again vetoed it, but a two-thirds majority in each chamber overrode the veto to allow it to become law without presidential signature. John Bingham and other congressmen argued that Congress did not yet have sufficient constitutional power to enact this law. Following passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, Congress ratified the 1866 Act in 1870. 

The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the President of the United States to subdivide Native American tribal communal landholdings into allotments for Native American heads of families and individuals.

Expanded context:
This period was marked by the hardening of racial apartheid through law and land. Jim Crow laws enforced racial subjugation across public and private life, including through property law, contracts, and inheritance practices. During the Oklahoma Land Rush, Black settlers—including Black Indians and Freedmen—participated and even founded all-Black towns like Boley and Langston. However, violent dispossession and racial hostility later undermined their autonomy. The Dawes Act, while focused on Indigenous land, also reshaped the rural landscape by privatizing and redistributing Native land—often to white settlers and railroads—exemplifying how racialized land policy created cascading losses across communities of color. Meanwhile, enforcement of the 1866 Civil Rights Act remained weak, and Black landowners were increasingly targeted through fraud, intimidation, and legal manipulation.

Morrill Act of 1890 (the Agricultural College Act of 1890 (26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. § 321 et seq.) expanded this model—land grants for universities (agricultural and technical schools) and founding of several Black colleges.

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The Morrill Act of 1890 was a response to segregation in higher education. It required states with land-grant institutions that excluded Black students to establish separate institutions for them, leading to the creation of many historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). While this act supported educational infrastructure for Black communities, it did not provide equitable access to land ownership or agricultural funding. HBCUs often received fewer resources and less land than their white counterparts, limiting the long-term economic impact. Meanwhile, Black farmers faced increased land loss at the turn of the century through discriminatory lending, lack of legal protections, and forced migrations driven by racial violence.

World War I, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war that lasted from 1914 to 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history.

The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting about 15 months from spring 1918 to early summer 1919, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time.

The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. 

Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933. Prohibitionists first attempted to end the trade in alcoholic beverages during the 19th century.

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in US history. It began in 1929 and did not abate until the end of the 1930s. The stock market crash of October 1929 signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. By 1933, unemployment was at 25 percent and more than 5,000 banks had gone out of business.

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The early 20th century brought global disruption and local instability that had a deep impact on Black landholders. The Great Migration marked a massive demographic shift as millions of African Americans fled the South to escape racial violence, political disenfranchisement, and economic oppression. While the migration offered new industrial jobs and urban possibilities, it often meant abandoning land—sometimes by necessity, sometimes due to direct displacement. The Great Depression compounded this loss. Black farmers, already locked out of most New Deal benefits, were disproportionately impacted by falling crop prices and farm foreclosures. At the same time, federal and state programs often excluded Black landowners or redirected support to white farmers. This period saw steep declines in Black land ownership nationwide.

The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. It responded to needs for relief, reform, and recovery from the Great Depression. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Redlining in the 1930s. In the United States, redlining is the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector, to residents of specific neighborhoods or communities, either directly or through the selective raising of prices.

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While the New Deal is often credited with stabilizing the economy and supporting American farmers, its policies frequently reinforced racial disparities. Black farmers were either excluded from federal programs or pushed into tenant and sharecropping systems through discriminatory implementation. Agencies like the Farm Security Administration provided direct aid and land purchase assistance—but rarely to Black families. Simultaneously, the rise of redlining under the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created literal maps of racial exclusion in urban and rural areas alike. Communities labeled as “hazardous” due to Black residency were cut off from loans and investment. These policies didn’t just limit land acquisition; they actively contributed to disinvestment and displacement, sowing the roots of structural land loss and wealth inequality that persist today.

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans. The original G.I. Bill expired in 1956, but the term "G.I. Bill" is still used to refer to programs created to assist U.S. military veterans.

Executive Order 9981 is an executive order issued on July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. It abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces. The executive order led to the end of segregation in the services during the Korean War

Expanded context:
The G.I. Bill was one of the most powerful federal tools for building middle-class wealth in the 20th century—through home loans, education, and land access. However, the benefits were administered by local agencies that overwhelmingly discriminated against Black veterans. While white veterans gained land, homes, and education, many Black veterans returned to redlined cities or rural towns where they were denied loans, blocked from buying homes, and excluded from agricultural assistance. Executive Order 9981 formally desegregated the military, but the racial wealth and land gap created by unequal G.I. Bill implementation had already widened dramatically. Black veterans had fought fascism abroad, only to return to economic apartheid at home.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.

FICO (legal name: Fair Isaac Corporation), originally Fair, Isaac and Company, is a data analytics company based in San Jose, California focused on credit scoring services. It was founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. Its FICO score, a measure of consumer credit risk, has become a fixture of consumer lending in the United States.

Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the term "white flight" became popular in the United States. They referred to the large-scale migration of people of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions.

Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. Construction of the system was authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the nation's premier civil rights legislation. The Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, required equal access to public places and employment, and enforced desegregation of schools and the right to vote.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 is a landmark law in the United States signed into law by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots. April 11, 1968

Expanded context:
The Civil Rights Era ushered in landmark legal victories, yet it coincided with major setbacks in Black land stability. While Brown v. Board challenged educational apartheid, housing and land access were still shaped by redlining, predatory lending, and exclusionary zoning. The creation of the FICO credit system standardized credit scoring but disproportionately penalized Black borrowers, reinforcing existing barriers to land and home ownership. White flight and the expansion of the interstate highway system displaced Black urban communities—bulldozing homes and severing access to inherited land. Despite the Fair Housing Act, enforcement was weak, and real estate steering, redlining, and discriminatory loans continued. Many Black families were unable to access suburban homeownership—the key wealth-building path of the era—and those who did often faced devaluation of their properties. Land loss persisted even amid legal progress.

Early 1980s: Reagan Era/Recession
The early 1980s recession in the United States began in July 1981 and ended in November 1982. One cause was the Federal Reserve's contractionary monetary policy, which sought to rein in the high inflation. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis, stagflation began to afflict the economy.

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The 1980s brought sweeping deregulation and disinvestment from social programs under the Reagan administration, which disproportionately harmed Black rural and urban communities. Economic hardship, discriminatory lending, and a decline in Black farm aid from the USDA intensified the decline in Black land ownership. During this period, land loss accelerated, especially in the rural South where intergenerational farmland was vulnerable to tax sales, legal challenges, and forced auctions. The lack of legal resources and financial support eroded decades of land stewardship.

The early 1980s recession in the United States began in July 1981 and ended in November 1982. One cause was the Federal Reserve's contractionary monetary policy, which sought to rein in the high inflation. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis, stagflation began to afflict the economy

Rise of credit—1989 implementation, and would evolve into today's most popular scoring model, the FICO Score from Fair, Isaac, and Company

USDA suits—Pigford v. Glickman (1999) was a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging racial discrimination against African-American farmers in its allocation of farm loans and assistance between 1981 and 1996. The lawsuit was settled on April 14, 1999, by Judge Paul L.

Heir laws—The term heirs-at-law is used to refer to those who would inherit under the state statute of descent and distribution if the decedent dies intestate (without a will), and they may or may not be beneficiaries under a will. A lineal heir is someone who inherits in a line that ascends or descends from a common ancestor.

Expanded context:
The rise of credit scoring systems created new barriers for Black homebuyers and landowners, as historical discrimination left many with little formal credit history. Pigford v. Glickman marked a historic acknowledgement of USDA discrimination, but many Black farmers never received compensation or regained lost land. Simultaneously, heir property laws—common in rural Black communities—made land vulnerable to forced partition sales and exploitation. Without wills or clear titles, land passed informally across generations, becoming entangled in legal disputes and making it difficult to access grants, loans, or protections. This structural vulnerability became one of the leading causes of Black land loss in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The United States subprime mortgage crisis was a nationwide financial crisis which occurred between 2007 and 2010, and contributed to the U.S. recession of December 2007 – June 2009. It was triggered by a large decline in home prices after the collapse of a housing bubble, leading to mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures, and the devaluation of housing-related securities.

Expanded context:
The subprime mortgage crisis disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx families with high-interest, high-risk loans, even when they qualified for better terms. As a result, Black homeownership plummeted during and after the Great Recession, erasing decades of tenuous gains. Urban and rural Black landowners alike saw their properties foreclosed, their credit decimated, and their communities destabilized. The housing crash widened the racial wealth gap and solidified land loss as an ongoing outcome of systemic financial racism.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of global society, triggering economic shutdowns, food insecurity, labor shortages, and spikes in housing instability. Black and Indigenous communities were disproportionately impacted in both health outcomes and economic fallout.

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The COVID-19 crisis magnified longstanding vulnerabilities in Black land stewardship. Farmers of color struggled to access emergency aid, while Black renters and landowners were hit hard by job loss and housing insecurity. Some Black communities responded with land-based mutual aid, community gardens, and cooperative development, reclaiming space through resilience and care. However, the broader system continued to favor corporate land acquisition, development speculation, and extractive real estate practices—making collective ownership and legal protections more urgent than ever.