Partition sales legally force black heirs to lose family farmland to developers

Evidence

That brings us to yet another way that black farmers continue to lose their land, which for once is not because of the USDA but due to developers who use sketchy legal rules to force the sale of black farmland in desirable locations. What’s more, when a black farmer dies without a will, the law allows for something called “partition sales,” which enables a third party to buy one heir’s interest and force a sale of the entire property. This generally results in a nonblack developer taking over the property for other purposes. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 408

Categorization

• DEFINE: “Partition sales” is a specific legal mechanism doing ongoing harm — worth defining precisely as a contemporary, not historical, channel of wealth extraction.