The government’s record-keeping failures shift proof burden onto it

Evidence

No proof on the part of black people will be required. Why? Because the government failed black people—and failed to keep adequate records. The burden should be placed on the government to make amends. In some cases, private white citizens burned down courthouses with the intention of destroying property titles and other records, as we saw in Part II; they would do anything to make it easier to usurp black Americans’ wealth. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 540

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Burning courthouses to destroy deeds is a counterpart to the grafted-tree/narrative infrastructure themes — destruction of records as a mechanism of wealth transfer.

Related

• The full extent of black wealth plunder is unknowable because record-keeping was deliberately omitted (similarity 0.80)
• Whites burned courthouses to erase black land titles and seize property (similarity 0.78)