Again, the 600,000 black farmers got their land stolen from them and the losses had nothing to do with the great migration. Blacks OWNED those farms so why are they moving north to work for someone else? See, this is the shit whites like Oldstyle miss when they try to dismiss the completeness of what whites have done to blacks.
Oldstyle wants to make this thing so sound so clean and easy, that blacks just left the land they owned and went north, and that it was the offer of jobs that made blacks sell their land to whites so the could go north and work for someone else. LOL,.
Whitecapping is not mentioned by Oldstyle and this is part of the overall dishonesty of the white racist argument any time blacks start discussing what happened to us during American history. Whitecapping was ethnic cleansing whereby whites would just swoop in on blacks kill up a family and take the property. Blacks were limited to what they called the dixie limit. If they got too prosperous, whitecapping occurred. In parts of the south you could go for miles and see noone black and that was because of whitecapping. But certainly this had nothing to do with the farms blacks lost, they lost them because they decided to move north.
When 500,000 blacks moved north between 1917-1918, whites in the south became alarmed. Blacks moving north was now a threat to their very way of life. Why the whites there could not understand why blacks were moving to the north like that. They figured blacks were happy getting white capped, black women routinely raped, unable to make money, their property forcibly taken with no protection from the law. So they figured that of course that somebody was telling blacks how to think, sound familiar?
And whites had to stop that.
Whites created statutes to stop blacks from being recruited by northern factories. Recruiters coming from the north to recruit blacks to work in northern factories suddenly were charged huge licensing fees and could be given prison sentences for enticing blacks to leave the south. In Macon Georgia officials made it a rule that a company had to pay 25,000 for a labor recruiting license along with recommendations from 10 local ministers, 10 manufacturers and 25 other businessmen in that community. That 25,000 was the equivalent of 2.6 million dollars today. Of course they could not get 45 such people to allow them to recruit their blacks. Jacksonville required a 1,000 dollar fee for the same license and failure to pay while recruiting blacks was a 600 dollar fine and 60 days in jail. The Georgia legislature made it a felony to recruit blacks to leave the state punishable by 7 years in prison.
Anyone suspected of being a labor agent was arrested and could be whipped or killed for giving blacks train tickets to go north.
As blacks went north they found that the only difference between a southern white and a northern one was geography. When blacks went north, so did lynchings. They are recorded as race riots, but that's disingenuous considering what happened. The reality is there were a series of massacres of blacks by whites in these years due to the northern migration of blacks trying to escape the conditions they had to endure in the south. Historians call what happened riots in the general “American” tradition of trying to reduce the seriousness of the atrocities.
The May and July East St. Louis massacres in 1917 caused the estimated deaths of 250 African Americans. Another 6,000 blacks were left homeless. These were labor and race related as whites felt threatened by the blacks migrating from the south. The damage caused by the rioting and vandalism cost the equivalent of 7.9 million in todays dollars. These massacres are said to be some of the worst “race riots” in the history of America.
I'll stop with that one, but there is a lot more to this and Oldstyles dishonest argument fails in the reality that blacks did not just move north and got good jobs. The faced terrible resistance in the north also.
But the 600,000 farms that were taken were not lost because blacks moved north.
In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, as the nation abandoned its black citizens and the South descended into the age of Jim Crow, African-Americans succeeded, against all odds, in acquiring a remarkable amount of land. By 1910, black people claimed ownership of nearly 16 million acres in America. They did so in spite of the constant threat of forced dispossession at the hands of white mobs and officials. Sometimes, black property owners faced sudden and violent attacks, such as the racial cleansing of
Forsyth County, Ga., in 1912 and the destruction of
“Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921.
As often, though, whites undermined black property ownership by more subtle means. White tax assessors routinely overvalued black-owned land, forcing black property owners to bear a heavier tax burden than whites (to pay for services they didn’t receive) and slowly draining families of earnings. If black-owned property became valuable or a black property owner challenged white supremacy, local officials could simply declare the property tax-delinquent and sell it at a tax sale.
Any discussion of reparations must include how this happened, who did it, and the laws, policies and practices that allowed it.
www.nytimes.com
