How to Reclaim Land Ownership for Black Americans in the South

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Spring 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “How Women of Color in the South Are Reclaiming Space.”

The dominant narrative of this nation’s people has always been inextricably intertwined with the tragic story of this nation’s land.

As the conventional account goes, despite the landless poverty many colonists brought with them from Europe and the financial instability several of the nation’s European founders endured, by the time the United States was officially founded, land ownership was considered a prerequisite for self-government.

By institutionalizing the nation’s history in these terms, we have detached the land from the deeply spiritual and nurturing role it plays in our lived realities. When we limit land to its role as an economic and political commodity, we are left with an amoral capitalistic view of the dispossession of Native American landholdings and uncompensated labor of enslaved African skilled laborers.

Within the context of restrictive history-telling, those with deeply held beliefs in divinity, ancestral ties, communal relationship, and the sacredness of life and land—including myself—may question any legal or financial compensatory scheme for the original and ongoing harms perpetrated against Black Americans.

However, one way to address the compounding harms against Black Americans is to collectively create land sovereignty at the local community level. Below, I will share a vision for doing this by combining tax-free land access, cooperative stewardship, and restored ancestral relationships to the natural environment.

A Note on Black and Indigenous Solidarity, Conflict, and Mutual Sovereignty

As a nation heavily weighted by an increasingly fractured political landscape, the time has come to explore a more unifying understanding of the United States’ origin story.

The dominant narrative offers a tale of White men and Indigenous “savages,” enslavers and the enslaved. Uncomplicated histories amplify the harms of domination, while virtually erasing the beauty of interconnection. This black-and-white caricature of US history has manufactured shame—shame of erasure, shame of genocide and land theft of the Indigenous peoples, shame of European colonizers who enslaved humans, and the shame of descending from enslaved humans—all of which discourages liberatory inquiry and imagination.

In fact, the standard account deprives Indigenous and Black communities of agency, making them objects of significant abuses, exploitation, and theft instead of autonomous, sovereign peoples.

Recentering people and their relationships to each other and the land allows us to see the significant cultural strengths and solidarities that helped these communities withstand the genocide of colonization. Early African-Indigenous solidarity was rooted in mutual understanding of nonextractive land stewardship practices, a source of Indigenous knowledge completely foreign to European colonizers.

Today, Indigenous and Black Americans each have valid and legitimate rights to land-based reparations….It is not an either-or, but rather a both-and.

The commonality of intermarriage, interdependent communities, and the role of Black Seminole sharecroppers as mediators and intermediaries between Seminoles and European colonizers, for example, highlights the deep interconnections throughout the Seminole Nation regardless of race or social constructs around blood quantum.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 ushered in an era of legal dispossession of Indigenous land ownership, so that, by the 1840s, no tribal nations could be found in significant numbers in the South except for a small group of Black and Indigenous Seminoles who had established free settlements in Florida in the 1700s. Yet this relatively small population inspired the largest uprising of enslaved Africans, successfully resisted enslavement, and, today, their descendants remain members of the Seminole Nation. This hidden history of solidarity highlights the revolutionary power of Black-Indigenous land sovereignty.

Regrettably, White supremacy has been weaponized to undermine broader coalitions between Indigenous and African peoples in myriad complex ways. Faced with increasing violence of genocidal elimination, not only were there unenslaved Black Americans who held enslaved peoples, but Native nations also recognized members of mixed European ancestry while excluding members with mixed African ancestry, even gradually adopting practices of domestic African enslavement.

Despite early alliances and interracial confederation, the violent, capitalist commodification of land in the United States largely divided Indigenous and African communities and severed each community’s access to the land as the site of spiritual, communal, and agricultural practices central to their ancestral identities.

Today, Indigenous and Black Americans each have valid and legitimate rights to land-based reparations. While the United States has a finite amount of land, there is no need for land-based reparations to be a zero-sum game. It is not an either-or, but rather a both-and. There can be no true land sovereignty without meaningful, mutual, reparative Indigenous and Black land sovereignty.

A Brief History of Black Land Ownership

Believing land ownership would afford them the same citizenship rights enjoyed by White Americans, when the Civil War ended in 1865 a group of Black ministers demanded land access for the Black community, resulting in the now famous General William T. Sherman’s Field Order No. 15, with its promise of 40-acre parcels of land along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. However, President Andrew Johnson overturned the order and returned the land—not to the Indigenous tribes, of course, but rather to White Southerners.

Nationally, a …study estimates that the value of lost Black-owned land between 1920 and 1997 is around $326 billion.

This was the first of many broken promises made to Black Americans during Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau—the federal agency tasked in 1865 with providing land access and health and education services to Black Americans (and, by default, to poor Whites) living in the South following emancipation—was chronically underfunded and understaffed, and ultimately closed in 1874, deprived of funding from Congress.

Even so, between the passage of the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery and 1920, Black Americans amassed nearly 20 million acres of land. Southern Black women played critical roles in this land accumulation, both individually and through church associations and benevolent societies. By 1900, in Savannah, GA, Black women owned $914,320 worth of land, a value of about $36.2 million today. These early Black landowners laid the foundation for Black-owned farms steeped in ancestral agricultural practice. Nationally, a study published by the American Economic Association estimates that the value of lost Black-owned land between 1920 and 1997 is around $326 billion.

Barriers to Black Land Ownership

How did this loss of Black-owned land occur? First, legal systems often explicitly excluded and dispossessed Black Americans. Additionally, during the Jim Crow era, racial terrorism was de facto legalized and institutionalized. At least 6,500 Black Americans were lynched between 1865 and 1950, primarily in the South.

For example, in Mississippi in 1944, a Black minister was lynched by a group of six White men because he refused to give them his 270 acres of land. Across the South, Black-owned coastal land was taken by a variety of means, including government action, so that White Americans could enjoy exclusive access to the beaches.

The system of racial terrorism and widespread dispossession drove millions of Black Americans to the North in what became known as the Great Migration. Despite unmatched efforts to acquire and protect the land, from 1920 to 1997, Black Americans lost 90 percent of their land, while White Americans lost only 2 percent of their land during the same time period.

The Enduring Legacy of Black Land Stewards

The many Black Americans who have remained in the South (as of 2023, 56 percent of the Black population lives in the South) have the opportunity to relate to the land in ways that reject the dominant land-as-commodity narrative.

Possibly most famously, in 1969, the legendary civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer leveraged land in Ruleville, MS, as the site of the Freedom Farm Corporation, a 600-acre Black cooperative that promoted community-owned development and farming.

Hamer is not alone. Throughout the South, Black farmers have maintained the tradition and continue to reclaim their land-based heritage, thus reconnecting their communities to their ancestral stewardship practices and relationships with the land.

In Georgia, Black women farmers are working across generations and regions to ensure the critical infrastructure needs are met for all Black farmers. Georgia’s state Senator and farmer Kim Jackson, operates a five-acre farm in metro Atlanta while also championing the needs of Black farmers throughout the state. She recently helped the Southwest Georgia Project, under the leadership of living legend Shirley Sherrod, secure seed money for a food processing hub in rural Southwest Georgia.

I recently visited Nia Kiara Cole, a fifth-generation Black farmer and steward of their family’s ancestral land in High Point, NC. Nia shared with me that managing Kin & Flow farm is possible because of the intentional relationships they have cultivated with relatives, neighbors, and members of the church next door to the farm. On the day I visited, Nia’s cousin stopped by to help prepare the land for upcoming planting. In addition to advancing their family’s legacy work with the land, Cole is also the fund manager of the Southern Black Farmers Community-Led Fund—one of the many ways Cole is supporting intergenerational stewardship of Southern Black resources for land retention.

When we look beyond the dominant narrative, we find many of these inspirational examples of Southern Black Americans empowering their local communities through land reclamation.

Cooperatively Owned and Democratically Stewarded Land

Regardless of their individual family histories, Black Americans cannot opt out of the myriad ways in which state-sanctioned dispossession and historic exclusion impact the community as a whole. Land ownership inequities are not only linked to the Black American community’s disproportionate wealth and health inequities, but also their relationships to institutions, other communities, and even across the diversity of the Black American community itself.

One strategy to boost Black communal landownership would be to use 501c3 nonprofits to acquire land.

One of the longest-standing cooperatively owned Black American landholdings, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund began operating in 1967 and shows that Black Americans across the South can cooperatively farm, preserve a forest, and inspire generations to develop cooperative businesses. This 1,300 acres of farm and forest land in Sumter County, AL, provides technical assistance and promotes solidarity through recreational opportunities for members, surrounding communities, and the public at large.

How to Restore Land Ownership in Black Communities

One strategy to boost Black communal landownership would be to use 501c3 nonprofits to acquire land. It is not unheard of for 501c3 nonprofits to own land, especially churches. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (informally known as the Mormon Church), for instance, recently spent $289 million to acquire 46 farms, increasing its land ownership portfolio to almost two million acres worth about $16 billion. Similarly, in the early 2000s, the Southern Baptist Foundation received 2,146 acres of land, which it sold at auction for over $10 million.

Following the example of the Black Church Food Security Network, local religious institutions should use their land wealth to address historic land exclusion and dispossession. Sections 501c7 and 501c8 of the US tax code similarly afford tax-exempt status to social clubs and fraternal lodges, respectively. Based on these existing tax-exempt entities, collective Black American land ownership, including for heirs’ property landowners, as well as emerging cooperative landholdings, could help Black Americans obtain and preserve land ownership.

Land as a commodity of individual wealth accumulation and hoarding of resources continues to perpetuate multiple enduring harms. Restoring positive relationships between Black Americans and the land invites local communities to create participatory, democratically and cooperatively managed land collectives and avoid land stewardship challenges, such as taxes on the land and improvements.

The time has come to make space for a national story that has the power to reclaim our relationships with the land and each other.

Through the lenses of reparations, reclamation, and complementary Indigenous sovereignty, Black Americans and their supporters can transform a story of tragedy and shame into one of exceptional power that all people can be proud to share.