State complicity enabled rivals to seize black wealth after lynchings

Evidence

Betty Moss gave birth to their second child about a month before Tommie was lynched. They named their newborn son Thomas Moss, Jr. With Tommie Moss dead, his creditors took what was due them and sold the People’s Grocery to William Barrett for one-eighth of its value. Betty took the family and moved to Indianapolis, where they had to start all over again. The wealth that the Mosses had worked so hard to build for Maurine and Tommie Jr. was violently stripped away with the help of the state. Ida B. Wells put it this way: “Thus, with the aid of the city and county authorities and the daily papers, that white grocer had indeed put an end to his rival Negro grocer as well as to his business.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 303

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This is a direct factual instance of wealth being forcibly stripped ‘with the help of the state’ — exactly the transfer mechanism reparations-as-accounting is built on.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in Brown’s saturated-system harm and the intergenerational wealth-loss chain central to her legal brief. — connects to: Black elites’ fortunes were bound to the masses through shared Jim Crow constraints — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 285