As a result of the state’s pitiful expenditures on “colored” schools, Ms. Jenkins had received only minimal education and never learned to read. So Ms. Jenkins entrusted a white neighbor who had befriended her to take her annual property tax payments to town for her. In the decades since, the land Jenkins once owned has generated untold amounts of wealth. While Ms. Jenkins’s case was particularly egregious, the legal theft of black land in similar ways was not uncommon. Tax sales were just one of several ways speculators and developers manipulated property and tax laws, and exploited historic inequities, to expropriate black people’s land.

Source: New York Times June 20, 2019 19:01 UTC