White planters deliberately steered tenancy to whites to exclude Black cane farmers

Evidence

In spite of the substantial barriers of capital and racism, African Americans nevertheless aspired to own sugarcane farms or rent them from white owners. A small number of Black sugar farmers inherited land from their antebellum free Black ancestors or accumulated property on their own. But they faced discrimination at every turn and the threat of violence if their success challenged the Jim Crow racial order. The historian Rebecca Scott found that although “black farmers were occasionally able to buy plots of cane land from bankrupt estates, or otherwise establish themselves as suppliers, the trend was for planters to seek to establish relations with white tenants or sharecroppers who could provide cane for the mill.” And if Black sugarcane farmers succeeded in the face of all these obstacles, they still had to face racist actions by government agencies, banks, and real estate developers who conspired to take their land. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 307

Categorization

• XREF: Systematic land-transfer-from-Black-farmers narrative connects to Bittle & Johnson/redlining literature and the broader ‘racism as infrastructure’ chain.