by Curtis Bunn
“Some 500 of them entered the house,” the asylum managers reported on July 25, 1863, in a record book housed at the New-York Historical Society. “After despoiling it of furniture, bedding, clothing, etc., they deliberately set fire to it, in different parts—simply because it was the home of unoffending colored Orphan Children.” The building was destroyed, and after a period of confusion and disappointment, the children were displaced to a facility on what is now Roosevelt Island.
“The destruction of this asylum, supported, as it was, solely by charity, is certainly one of the worst and wickedest of crimes that were perpetrated during this memorable day,” the New York Times wrote in a story two days later, “and clearly shows that resistance to the draft is but a cry raised to cover the most atrocious crimes that human nature is capable of committing.”
New York in the mid-1800s was also home to Seneca Village, a community of about 225 residents, 75 percent of them Black. It was a haven in a city that was already growing into the bustling New York it is today. Most importantly, it was separated from the fierce racism that was rampant, although New York State had abolished slavery in 1827. Discrimination reigned and hampered African American life.
In 1853, the New York state legislature reserved 775 acres of land in Manhattan to create America’s first major landscaped public park. To do so, the city used eminent domain to procure the land where Seneca Village sat, meaning as a government agency it was able to take private land for public use, with compensation to the landowners.
That payment for Black people was less than its value, of course. By 1857, Seneca Village was no more, and another self-built wealth-building Black community was abolished to make way for what is now Central Park.
Today, the destruction of Black wealth is more sophisticated and less violent, but devastating nonetheless, Mitchell points out. For decades, Black farmers owned the land where they grew their crops and raised their cattle, but against racism that eventually doomed them.
The United States Department of Agriculture admittedly “systemically discriminated” against Black farmers for countless years. Further, after decades of denying it had discriminated, the USDA, in a 1999 class action lawsuit called Pigford v. Glickman, confessed that it had denied Black farmers the ability to apply for federal loans and other resources to sustain themselves, while welcoming and financing white farmers.
The suit ended up being the largest government settlement in U.S. history, with nearly $1 billion paid or credited to more than 13,300 farmers under the settlement’s consent decree. Some Black farmers received only $62,500 each—barely enough to balance the years of debt built up from being denied loans or having loans with high interest rates. And that doesn’t include the Black farmers who were unaware of the suit and therefore received nothing.
Even after the settlement, the USDA did not stop its racist practices, through Republican and Democratic administrations, Mitchell, the property law attorney, said. According to a USDA report, there were nearly 1 million Black farmers in 1920, but only 50,000 in 2017. Additionally, the think tank the Center for American Progress wrote in a report that “structural racism has robbed Black farmers of the opportunity to build wealth” and contributed to “the loss of more than 36 million acres of farmland between 1920 and 1978.”
“The USDA’s Office of Civil Rights crafted a report that said, ‘Yes, we have discriminated after years of lying.’ Essentially,” Mitchell said, “the Black farmers were continued to be denied the ability to apply for loan programs and other programs that rendered their ownership vulnerable because they weren’t generating any income and it drove them into foreclosure.
“Often losing their land resulted in a decline of status. So, there’s a loss of status, a loss of income, and when there were these forced sales, they usually yielded a price far below market value. In many cases, they would sell for 10 percent of the market value. So not only did they lose their property, if you look at their asset portfolio, they were far less diversified than whites. So, you have this utter devastation of economic impact.”
In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill authorizing $1.25 billion to the late claimants—known as Pigford II. This influx of funds helped—18,000 Black farmers received $62,500 each, taxes paid on the award and debt relief and the settlement—but not before many Black farmers had lost their businesses and land.
“I was offended when I began my studies,” Mitchell said, “because there were people who were justifying these forced sales by saying they were trying to make it a public good. ‘Our society needs to have reserved property so it can develop economically, and this growth will increase the GDP and be the benefit of everyone.’ My point was when we talk about access to land—the land that was viewed as being ‘appropriately available’—it was disproportionately owned by Black and brown people. So, it wasn’t like they decided to take land from people irrespective of their racial, ethnic, or social economic standing.
“This notion was that it was a normal position for African Americans to have very insecure property rights, property rights that at any time could be undermined for what they considered better and higher economic use of the property…[It] was offensive. Underlining that notion that we had to accept that Black people’s lives are just not that important. Their property ownership, their communities are not as important. They should be at the ready to have their rights sacrificed for the greater good.”
At the same time, the destruction of Black people’s way of living comes with a bonus indiscretion: a destruction of history and culture. Mitchell visited his hometown of San Francisco years after he left to see how his old neighborhood and city had changed. He saw a deficit that he could not quantify. The city that was 13 percent African American when he’d grown up there had diminished to 3 percent. “And most of those left were homeless,” Mitchell said.
“The loss of these residents of color and businesses in the Fillmore District was enormous. And it was insulting that the justification the city used was there were all kinds of crime and prostitution. So, anything they had to say about my old neighborhood was negative to justify that redevelopment.
“My mother still lives in San Francisco. There’s hardly any middle-class African Americans left in the city of San Francisco.
“I’m like, ‘Wow. No Black people. Gone.’ The banners on the streets label it the Historic Jazz District. In the 1960s, San Francisco was known as the Harlem of the West. There were more jazz clubs there than any place west of the Mississippi River. Now, after driving out the Black people, they are using that reference of the jazz district to drive tourists in, which I find ironic because when African Americans were there, we never heard about this positive history. But now that the African American community is gone, the city is capitalizing on this rich, important history that is essentially erased.
“Whether you’re talking about Harlem or southwest Georgia, there’s often an erasure of important culture and history.”
All of this illuminates the importance of Mitchell’s Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act of 2016. It gives Black property owners power to protect their land, which protects their wealth and their culture and history.
In writing the law, Mitchell said he “looked at legal ways that [wealthy] people structured their acquisition of property with the most sophisticated real estate lawyers and attorneys who specialized in wills and estates. I looked at the nature of those types of agreements, and I borrowed from those so disadvantaged property owners can have some of the same advantages that wealthier people have.
“It’s been important because it preserves family wealth that comes with the opportunity to pass on property to your children. It preserves that family history. It matters that everyone has a fair chance at protecting what’s theirs.”
Moving On
By Curtis Bunn
So volatile and emotionally charged were Donald Trump’s four years in the White House that Black people who had been conditioned to doubt America roundl
y applauded his downfall in the 2020 presidential election and framed his demise as a symbol of a better future.
But “better” was a relative term. Better than the Trump term of racial vitriol, either spewed, alluded to, suggested, supported, applauded, or condoned? Yes, it would be markedly “better,” a desperately needed departure from the exhaustive rhetoric and policies that galvanized and emboldened many individuals and factions that espoused racist ideals, probably incited violence, and generally contributed to the morose feeling that hovered over the nation.
All this was amplified during the coronavirus pandemic that virtually shut down the economy and disproportionately fulminated African American communities…and Trump did virtually nothing to decelerate the spread.
But Joe Biden’s landslide victory—uselessly challenged by Trump and his band of insalubrious lawyers—did not foreshadow a “better” America; it promised a return to normalcy of the pre-Trump United States, which was not especially kind to Black people, either.
A message on social media after the election was called on November 7, 2020, was noteworthy: “Now maybe we can get back to normal racism. This ultra racism of the last four years was too much.”
Those two sentences, while glib, resounded with truth. If Trump and his sycophants performed a phlebotomy on the African American community, draining it of its peace, a Biden administration would serve as a transfusion of sunlight, restoring the status quo. The status quo was, indeed, more acceptable than Trumpism. But the existential yearning was that the making of a better America could come out of the carnage.
And that was the rub: Ousting the anomalous Trump did not make America better. It gave America the chance to be better.
First, though, America in general and Black people in particular had to heal. The stress of the racial division ignited by Trump and fostered by his minions dumped stress on the population that had historically been stressed out by structural and systemic racism for nearly 400 years. The four years of Trump were a figurative pandemic in and of itself.
Sonja Sackor lived a mile from one of Trump’s Texas stronghold areas, Rockwall County, just outside of Dallas. It had been a comfortable place to reside for Sackor before Trump stunned many by winning the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton. Throughout his presidency, his inflammatory rhetoric increased by the year, empowering his supporters to exercise their previously pent-up maliciousness on anyone who did not view the world through Trump’s narrow, jaded prism.
When the election neared, the contempt was so forceful that she said she had to mentally “put on my armor” just to leave the house to execute a routine errand.
“I knew something could be done or said,” Sackor said. “I had a Biden-Harris sign removed from my yard. Trump-Pence signs popped up everywhere. It was unsettling.”
Sackor’s discomfort was magnified by a succession of rallies for Trump in the nearby county that usually presented a hostile environment for a Black woman who did not look like the typical Trump radical bootlicker.
“People yelled things as they drove by, blew their horns. It [was] so exhausting for four years, filled with anger, depression, fatigue and insomnia,” Sackor said. “Self-medicating to just get through the day…I faced…bigotry, racism, bullying, ‘unpeaceful’ protesters publicly protesting with open-carry weapons, yelling profanities and derogatory comments regarding the election. Very unnerving and intimidating.”
Sackor’s case was similar to countless Black Americans who felt like Trump’s bluster suffocated them.
The ex-president’s public demeanor more than offended Black people; it injured them, emotionally and physically, according to Dr. Jessica Isom, an African American psychiatrist who works at the Codman Square Health Center in Boston. Through his words or Tweets, tension from Trump’s defending of white nationalists and militia, his calling African nations “shithole countries,” vice president Kamala Harris a “monster,” and countless other indignations on Black people, anger developed in the Black body, which transformed into stress, which manifested itself in tangible ways.
“For a lot of people there has been release of a long-held breath,” Isom said. “For one, there has been lots of anti-Blackness in how [Trump] talks about Black people. And two, his policy decisions had an overall detrimental impact on our ability to feel like the highest leader in the land cares about our well-being. The [coronavirus] pandemic, Lord knows, you can call that anti-Black and anti-indigenous—the people who are most vulnerable suffered the most because he did not make moves that would take care of them.”
And so myriad impacts occurred: unexplained body aches, especially in the back and neck, lack of sleep or too much sleep, moodiness, stomach pain, over- or undereating, and anxiety. “Those are ways stress comes out,” Isom said.
Yale University psychiatrist Terrell Holloway said anxiety in the body created the potential for future health issues. “You experience [this stress] and due to the physiology response, it leaves you more vulnerable to heart issues and diabetes because it modulates your digestive system through secreting cortisol, which impacts how you release your digestive enzymes.
“It all co-relates with the health disparities that are unique to Black people because of structural racism. When you have a president who triggers these stressors, particularly over an extended period of time, issues can occur.”
It was also a psychological blow that, while Biden eventually won in a blowout, more than 75 million people voted for Trump in the largest voter turnout in U.S. history.
“That’s a clear message that the country is divided,” Sheila Miller, a Washington, D.C., native said. “It takes away from the joy you had knowing Trump was gone. We still have to deal with almost half of the voting population who support this man’s racist ideology. That’s scary.”
The chance to be a better America came out of Trump’s failure, which was as much as anyone could hope for at that point.
Hope for the Future
By Curtis Bunn and Michael H. Cottman
The irony of Trump’s madness is that in a real but unquantifiable way, his apparent attempts to further marginalize the already-marginalized Black community galvanized the next wave of racial dissidents.
From high school students on up, Black youth and young adults stepped to the front, leading in various ways to fight the injustices that seemed to be illuminated under Trump.
Jordan Sims did not plan to create the organization Teenagers Looking for Change when he entered his junior year at Westlake High School in Atlanta. But George Floyd’s killing—on top of the other slayings of Black people by law enforcement—inspired him to take a lead in bringing together his peers to effect change.
For his troubles, Sims was sprayed in his eyes with mace by cops during a Floyd protest in downtown Atlanta. “I was on the front line,” Sims explained. “The police officers got agitated and started pushing us back. And it turned into chaos, and someone pulled out the pepper spray and got me.
“The pepper spray is terrible; it hurts,” he continued. “But I was glad I was there. I wouldn’t take any part of it back. I wanted to show I care and send the message that we’re sick and tired of being treated as we are. We want to be treated better. We should be treated better.”
Sims described himself and his political disposition as “Malcolm X more than I am Martin Luther King,” he said. “It’s time for action. It’s time for change. And, as teenagers, the next generation, we have to step up.”
Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the first Black female journalist at the Washington Post, has been writing about building a better nation for five decades as she chronicled American life. The four years of the Trump presidency disturbed her and made her wonder about what the future would look like.
But the country that elected Trump in 2016 voted him out in 2020, which infused Gilliam with optimism that better days are ahead, especially for Black people.
“America saw an explosion of Black hope in the 2020 elections,” she said. “The Black commu
nities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were needed to end the white supremacist, narcissistic rule in the White House and open the door for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the first black woman vice president of the United States…and they did it.
“This is a time for celebration, but also a time to invest in Black leaders to take the lead in campaigns and committees. We are headed into the ll7th Congress with a larger caucus that will fight for Black America, which, in turn, fights for all Americans. We have worked hard this cycle to support candidates who will embrace the values we know will move the country in the right direction.”
Gilliam’s optimism was shared by many—and questioned by just as many, who have witnessed the country go through change before, but not enough change.
“Donald Trump blasted a serious hole in the American ship of state,” award-winning veteran journalist Clem Richardson said. “Four years of his addled leadership has shaken American allies and divided her citizenry, clearly for election cycles to come.
“The contentious issues arising from his inept presidential stewardship are almost too innumerable to list,” Richardson said. “In his wake Trump leaves America facing more existential issues than our nation has had to confront almost since the Civil War.”
The path forward, Richardson said, requires the public to bone up on the responsibilities of government and how it impacts everyday life.
“The first steps in our nation’s way forward are clear: a return to and an expansion of civics education in our nation’s schools and colleges, and a reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine governing American media entities,” Richardson said. “The 2020 presidential election made clear that many Americans, including President Trump, who, in too frequent public statements, made clear that he saw presidential power as almost dictatorial, have no idea how the government works.