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1/ In our latest cover story, @fivefifths investigates the war waged by deed of title that dispossessed black agricultural landowners of millions of acres. on.theatln.tc/EwZUhU9 
@fivefifths 2/ Unlike their counterparts even two or three generations ago, black people living and working in the Mississippi Delta today have been almost completely uprooted from the soil—as property owners, if not as laborers.
@fivefifths 3/ In Washington County, Mississippi, black people make up 72 percent of the population but own only 11 percent of the farmland, in part or in full. In Tunica County, black people make up 77 percent of the population but own only 6 percent of the farmland.
@fivefifths 4/ From the beginning, even the most enterprising black landowners found themselves fighting a war of attrition, often fraught with legal obstacles that made passing title to future generations difficult.
@fivefifths 5/ While most of the black land loss appears on its face to have been through legal mechanisms—the tax sale, the partition sale, and the foreclosure—it mainly stemmed from illegal pressures.
@fivefifths 6/ In Sunflower County, a man named Ted Keenan told investigators that in 1956, local banks had denied him loans after a bad crop because of his position with the NAACP, where he openly advocated for voting rights.
@fivefifths 7/ Major audits and investigations of the USDA have found that illegal pressures levied through its loan programs created massive transfers of wealth from black farmers to white ones, especially in the period just after the 1950s.
@fivefifths 8/ Between 1950 and 1964, black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land. In today’s dollars, the loss of property and income was estimated to be between $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion.
@fivefifths 9/ Many black farmers who escaped foreclosure were defrauded by white tax assessors who set assessments too high, leading to unaffordable tax obligations.
@fivefifths 10/ “Mass dispossession did not require a central organizing force or a grand conspiracy. Thousands of individual decisions by white people, enabled or motivated by greed, racism, existing laws, and market forces, all pushed in a single direction,” writes @fivefifths.
@fivefifths 11/ The Scotts were one of the families that lost their land, and after a long battle to prove their case, in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in economic damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt forgiveness.
@fivefifths 12/ The large wealth gap between white and black families today exists in part because of this historic loss. Read more about the structures that excluded black people from earning wealth in “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: theatln.tc/f8Fge6BA
@fivefifths 13/13 “This is our land,” Willena Scott-White told @fivefifths. Read the story here: on.theatln.tc/EwZUhU9
