Lynching families’ forced flight permanently disrupted their wealth-building

Evidence

A recent study conducted by Shytierra Gaston at Georgia State University reinforces the idea that lynching was used as a tool to instill fear, seize property, and reinstate white supremacy. The study found that of a subset of twenty-two lynching victims who were killed in the South between 1883 and 1972, most of their families, like Betty Moss and her children, and Ida B. Wells, were forced to leave “behind their social capital, support systems, resources, and wealth.” White Americans like William Barrett, who were responsible for such lynchings, more often than not wound up taking possession of their victims’ property. Because the victims’ families had been forced to flee “with little other than the clothes on their backs,” their ability to build wealth was disrupted. They were forced to start over from scratch, plunging them further behind their white peers financially. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 305

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SHARE: Gaston’s 22-victim study with the ‘clothes on their backs’ detail is a sharp, citable finding for anyone working on reparations or racial wealth gaps.

Related

• Lynching forcibly transferred black wealth to white perpetrators (similarity 0.93)
• Most surveyed lynching victims were propertied and lost everything (similarity 0.86)
• Lynching victims disproportionately owned land targeted for seizure (similarity 0.84)
• Lynching’s wealth harm diffused outward to extended kin networks (similarity 0.82)
• Lynching concentrated in the South and punished black economic success (similarity 0.82)
• States with more historical lynchings have higher poverty today (similarity 0.80)
• Lynching destroyed Black families’ intergenerational wealth transfers for decades. (similarity 0.79)
• Lynching inflicts harms that descend across generations (similarity 0.79)
• Lynching enabled property transfer to white rivals at a fraction of value (similarity 0.79)
• Lynching’s function of stripping citizenship spanned land grabs and riots (similarity 0.79)