Category 1970s Housing Justice

The Emergency Land Fund fights to reverse a decades-long economic catastrophe: the mass loss of Black-owned land.

Between 1910 and 1970, Black Americans lost approximately 9 million acres of farmland in the South — a staggering transfer of wealth driven not by market forces alone but by tax sales, predatory legal maneuvers, discriminatory USDA lending, and the…

A network of civil rights lawyers takes Southern cities to court for delivering inferior public services to Black neighborhoods.

Across the South in the 1970s, a consistent and well-documented pattern had taken hold in cities and counties: local governments provided dramatically inferior public services — paved roads, streetlights, sewage systems, garbage collection — to Black neighborhoods compared to white…