This is What King Actually Said

[MizMolly]

Try to stop repeating the standard right wing dumb ass rhetoric. When 40 percent of whites in America today live on homestead land, don't talk about something being ancient.

And the next time you drive by a suburb, ask yourself are you driving on a highway that killed a black business district. All you offer are excuses and obfuscation. Until you learn about Dr. King, the real Dr. King, please stop trying to tell black people what he stood for.

From 1862 to 1934, the federal government granted over a million and a half homesteads to private citizens. This represented approximately ten percent of the entire landmass of the United States.

40% of whites live on homestead land?

 

[cnm]

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MLK is revered today but the real King would make white people uncomfortable | Michael Harriot

Martin Luther King Jr was a walking, talking example of everything this country despises about the quest for Black liberation

www.theguardian.com

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Although, in death, he became one of the most revered figures in US history, for the entirety of the 39 years that King lived and breathed, there wasn’t a single day when the majority of white Americans approved of him. In 1966, Gallup measured his approval rating at 32% positive and 63% negative. That same year, a December Harris poll found that 50% of whites felt King was “hurting the negro cause of civil rights” while only 36% felt he was helping. By the time he died in 1968, three out of four white Americans disapproved of him. In the wake of his assassination, 31% of the country felt that he “brought it on himself”.​

 

[flacaltenn]

flacaltenn, Please stop. You make me laugh.

Passed in 1862, the Homestead Acts gave away 246 million acres of land. To qualify for Homestead land a person had to be a citizen of the United States and blacks were not given citizenship until 1866. Research shows that 99.73 percent of that land went to whites, including white immigrants. 1.5 million white families were given free land or the equivalent of a minimum of $500,000 per family. Today 93 million whites still live on homestead land, which is at least 40 percent of the white population in America.

Shawn D Rochester, The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America, pp, 49, Good Steward Publishing, Southbury CT., 2018

"As early as 1865, certain white Southerners put legal obstacles in place to prevent ex-slaves from acquiring property. Magdol (1977) explains, In the provisional state governments under President Johnson’s protective leniency, planters not only prohibited black landownership but enacted extreme measures of social control that virtually restored slavery. The black codes struck directly at freedmen striving to escape their subordination and to obtain their communities. It was class and race legislation."

Williams, T. (2000). The Homestead Act: A major asset-building policy in American history (CSD Working Paper No. 00-9). St. Louis, MO: Washington University, Center for Social Development. Pg.11

You keep looking for reasons to deny, you need to quit.

Furthermore, the recently emancipated owned no cash and had no experience in dealing with the government, rendering the process even more difficult. But perhaps the biggest hurdle for freedpeople involved the year-long labour contracts they had been cajoled or forced into signing shortly after slavery was outlawed. Leaving a job before the end date of a contract frequently resulted in virtual re-enslavement on a chain gang. Indeed, blacks had been locked into these contracts until the very date (1 January 1867) that they stopped receiving special homesteading benefits.

By the end of the SHA 10 years later, nearly 28,000 individuals had been awarded land. Combined with the claimants of the original Homestead Act, then, more than 1.6 million white families – both native-born and immigrant – succeeded in becoming landowners during the next several decades.

Conversely, only 4,000 to 5,500 African-American claimants ever received final land patents from the SHA.

The Homestead Acts were unquestionably the most extensive, radical, redistributive governmental policy in US history. The number of adult descendants of the original Homestead Act recipients living in the year 2000 was estimated to be around 46 million people, about a quarter of the US adult population. If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth and property ownership to a single entitlement programme, then the perpetuation of black poverty must also be linked to national policy. Indeed, the Homestead Acts excluded African Americans not in letter, but in practice – a template that the government would propagate for the next century and a half.

With the advent of emancipation, therefore, blacks became the only race in the US ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital. Having nothing else upon which to build or generate wealth, the majority of freedmen had little real chance of breaking the cycles of poverty created by slavery, and perpetuated by federal policy. The stain of slavery, it seems, is much more widespread and lasting than many Americans have admitted. Yet it is the legacy of the Reconstruction – particularly the failure of land redistribution – that so closely coupled poverty and race in the US.

Land and the roots of African-American poverty | Aeon Ideas

The Homestead Act gave 1.6 million white families – and fewer than 6000 black families – 160 acres of virtually free land

aeon.co

You dont get the point. MORE THAN 5000 blacks JOINED the "land boomers". Because the "grants" were FUNGIBLE and could be sold. And those that discovered they COULD NOT SURVIVE in a barren grassland sold part or all of it to new takers.

All that I linked to about DOZENS of black towns being settled of which many survived is FACT.

Not buying the problems with "endentured contracts" keeping SOME of them from participating. It didn't prevent A LOT of blacks from taking advantage of cheap land.

And you STILL miss the major point -- which is -- Virtually NO link to inherited wealth EXISTS TODAY from those land grants. It's changed hands so many times since then that;s it's a NON ISSUE. THEY DIDN"T GET WEALTHY. They LARGELY DIED and suffered and scraped by and PUT MORE MONEY AND BLOOD AND SWEAT into it than the land was worth. So -- NOT BLOODY likely, they're sons and daughters got ANYTHING of value and 2 generations later -- the land was sold for $59 bucks an acre. WHERE'S the INTERGENERATIONAL WEALTH --- you missed out on???

The ONLY people that made money QUICKLY were the land shark developers and retailers. Maybe some East coast bankers who LOANED cash for development of that land.

If we gave you 150 acres of UNDEVELOPED land today in the middle of nowhere -- HOW MANY GENERATIONS until you had "wealth" to pass on in perpetuity to descendents? What's the odds that ANY of the LAND value would still BE in your descendents' hands after 3 or 5 generations? And what would be your CHANCES of MAKING it valuable?