Lynching victims disproportionately owned land targeted for seizure

Evidence

Of the twenty-two lynching cases surveyed, Gaston found that more than half of the victims had owned land as well as other assets like businesses, livestock, and equipment. When she interviewed descendants of these victims, she learned of the economic toll caused by their family member’s lynching. In one case, when a woman’s father was lynched, “the responsibility of the family was abruptly placed on her mother (the victim’s wife), who ended up ‘taking on several jobs’ and becoming ‘the sole provider of the family’ of seven children with the help and support of ‘her parents and my father’s father.’ ” As that same survivor put it: “We went from prosperity to poverty overnight. All the resources my father had owned, the white man just came and took them away and there was nothing we could do about it.” Another descendant described how his family’s land was sold in the wake of his great-grandfather’s murder and was now the site of “the biggest, most opulent house in the town.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 308

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘prosperity to poverty overnight’ and the opulent house on stolen land are powerful, citable vignettes for the reparations argument.