Whites burned courthouses to erase black land titles and seize property

Evidence

Another strategy for stealing land and capital from black Americans was to destroy official documents and create “gaps in the public record.” In Paulding, Mississippi, on the evening of September 10, 1932, more than a dozen whites set fire to the city courthouse. The property records for half of Jasper County, a predominantly black area, went up in smoke overnight. Once it was no longer clear who owned title to much of the property, Masonite, a company specializing in wood products, swooped in and won legal ownership of more than 9,500 acres of land in the area. The AP pieced together information from the limited property records that survived the fire and “document[ed] that at least 204.5 of those acres had been acquired by Masonite after black owners were driven off by the Klan.” Masonite has since reaped millions of dollars in revenue from the land in the form of natural resources like gas, timber, and oil. As soon as black Americans began to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, their feet were cut off. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 318

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete instance of the saturated-system harm chain: state-condoned (or state-tolerated) violence erasing black wealth that the FHA redlining chapter builds on.
• SEED: The arson-as-legal-strategy angle: destroying public records as an instrument of wealth transfer is a sharply documentable claim for a reparations essay.