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After emancipation, formerly enslaved Black Americans knew that the key to economic freedom was land ownership, but as soon as they began to acquire land, local tax assessors began to overassess their land and exact steep penalties if they couldn’t pay the resulting inflated property taxes. For the past 150 years, all over the country, the same story has played out, with African Americans paying disproportionately higher property taxes, whether due to systemic inequities or corrupt local officials, while at the same time receiving dramatically fewer public services. And due to a Depression-Era law, aimed at limiting the tax bargaining powers of large property owners, Black Americans have been unable to seek redress against discriminatory property tax assessments in the US Supreme Court. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Andrew W. Kahrl, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, and author of The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Baby won't you please come home blues,” written by Charles Warfield and performed by Bessie Smith on April 11, 1923, in New York; the recording is in the public domain and is available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a sign in Harlingen, Texas, photographed in 1939, by Lee Russell; available via the The New York Public Library on Unsplash; free to use under the Unsplash License.
Additional Sources:
Andrew W. Kahrl is Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the history of race and inequality in housing, real estate, and local tax policy and administration in the US. He has also researched and written on the social and environmental history of beaches, outdoor recreation, land use and development in the coastal US. Kahrl is the author of the books The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline, and The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South, and has written numerous articles, essays, and opinion pieces for academic and popular publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian.
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