Terrorist violence against black farmers transferred their land to white neighbors with impunity

Evidence

In another instance, on the night of October 4, 1908, a group of fifty white men wearing hoods encircled the home of black farmer David Walker in Hickman, Kentucky. They demanded that Walker come out so they could give him a whipping. Walker shot at them instead, and in retaliation, the crowd set his house on fire. When Walker and his family finally came running out, the men shot at them, injuring three children and killing everyone else. Walker’s oldest son was burned alive inside the house. Again, no one was ever brought to justice, and Walker’s two-and-a-half-acre farm was subsumed into the property of a white neighbor, who subsequently sold it to someone else, “whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 312

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete case evidence for the reparations brief’s hidden-history pillar; parallels the Crawford and Ocoee land-loss cases that follow in this chapter. — connects to: Whites who sold to blacks faced threats and harassment from their own neighbors — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 220