A Black farmer’s prosperity triggered his neighbor’s violent land theft

Evidence

Dorsey told the story of a well-respected Black farmer who managed to save enough money to buy a 140-acre farm, where he lived with his wife and twelve children, three of whom were teachers. The farmer even earned praise in the local paper for raising $12,000 in Liberty bonds to support U.S. war efforts. But after the article was published, his neighbor, an illiterate white man, said, “He’s getting too damned prosperous and biggity for a nigger.” Not long after, the white neighbor had a property line drawn twenty-five feet into the Black farmer’s land and dared him to cross it. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 906

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the general claim in 902 — prosperity provoking the harshest response; useful exemplar for the case study.