The "Silenced" Crisis: The Disappearance of
Small Black Towns and Settlements throughout the United States
Written By Kenneth McClenton / Researched By Bonnie Williams
“The property that we owned was prime property.
Over time, it’s been sold and traded and stolen.”
— Gullah native Alex Brown.
Miss Abigail remembers.
She would run down Dunbar towards Main Street every afternoon during the summer of her teenage years. Beautiful and athletic, she imagined someday running in the Olympics like Wilma Rudolph. Abbey imagined once she returned with her Gold Medal that a street in her town would be named after her like the one named after Paul Laurence Dunbar. In those days, the post office was headquartered in the home of one of the town elders. He was the most trusted of men and one of the most valued fathers of the town. He knew all secrets and revealed none. The Elder Post Man loved everyone and knew each child by name. She would get an ice pop every afternoon when she arrived at the home where the Old Man would pull his visor over his forehead, turn to the set boxes, and pull out the day's mail. In moments, her thirst quenched, mail in hand, she sprinted back towards home, past the many beautiful, hand-built houses. The town was alive and well. She knew that it always would be.
Time has gone by quickly. Things have changed.
After high school, most of the young people left the small town founded by Booker T. Washington, Congressman George Henry White, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Harriett Aletha Gibbs, Joseph Vance and many other prominent Black Americans from the early 20th century. The attractions of Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Chicago were too great to resist. After graduating from high school, she decided that the "planned Negro town" of Whitesboro, New Jersey would be her home. Whitesboro was established in 1902 as a town sited exclusively for African Americans. The idea came in response to increasing white resistance to black residents in Cape May County, New Jersey. The African-American Equitable Industrial Association, founded by Reverend J.W. Fishburn and four other members of Cape May City’s AME Zion Church, purchased the land in an effort inspired by the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington. With the help of many investors from the South, most notably the George H. White Land Improvement Company, the Association purchased 2,000 acres of land approximately ten miles north of Cape May City for $14,000. The first Black community post office was named White, after founder George White, and then, renamed Whitesboro.
Black towns and their landowners have not found the "pursuit of happiness" to be "crystal stairs". In fact, the Associated Press, in an investigation that included interviews of over 1,000 people and the examination of tens of thousands of public records in county courthouses and state and federal archives, documented 107 land takings in 13 Southern and border states. In those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more than 24,000 acres of farm and timberland plus 85 smaller properties. Even the smaller properties measured great value to the economic engines of their towns for they included stores and city lots. Today, the possessed lands, valued at many millions of dollars, are often owned by individual investors or by corporations.
There are many factors that have contributed to the demise of these towns and their properties. It is estimated that over eighty-one percent (81%) of these early black landowners didn’t make wills or establish estates. Many landowners lacked access to legal resources. Their inheritors, without a clear title, were unable to firmly claim the estate's properties and it became designated as "heirs’ property". Without clear title, there are a great many restrictions with what one can do with their property. Such inheritances are most prevalent in low-income communities. In the southern states, according to one estimate, more than 50 percent of heirs’ property owners are African-American,
Many other factors contributed to the loss of black-owned land during the 20th century, including systemic lending discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture and other red-lining institutions, partition sales in which developers force the sale of a property by auction, forced bankruptcies due to outstanding property tax debt in which properties were auctioned off, the industrialization that lured workers into factories, and the Great Migrations.
Corrupt development, under the cover of darkness done even by major black corporatists, industrialists, and media personalities, has enjoined these towns and their property owners to swift demises. The aged landowners, often isolated from families and friends, find it easy to enter into unscrupulous agreements for their property by those that they believe would do them no harm because of the color of their skin and not the content of their character. Many an injured owner has exclaimed, " I can not believe that somebody with that kind of reputation and of my own race would take advantage of me!" The color of money supersedes the color of skin in real-life Monopoly.
The Honorable Johnny Ford, the Founder of The World Conference of Mayors, Inc. (WCM) and the Founding President of Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance, Inc. (HBTSA), understands the plight of "Booker T's Towns" and unincorporated cities around the country. According to the HBTSA website: "More than five hundred settlements were established with the physical elements and cultural institutions in a town format. Only fifty to sixty Black towns were legally incorporated in nineteen states between 1865 and 1915. The separate Black towns represented radical options when they were founded in the nineteenth century. They incorporated self-government and independent enterprise into streams of African American ritual and tradition." During the 2019 World Conference of Mayors, Inc. Collaboration Conference in Orlando and Eatonville, Florida, Mayor Ford will focus a great deal of attention on solutions for the ever shrinking and impoverished communities that once were the hopes of economic strength for minorities. In fact, the Conference will offer the theatrical rendering of “Booker T’s Towns” by the Tuskegee Repertory Theatre, Inc. "Booker T's Towns" is dedicated to HBTSA and is about Booker T. Washington's relationship with five (5) Negro Towns. The setting for the play is 1915 when leaders of the towns attended the National Negro Business League Meeting and afterward gathered to meet with and thank Booker T. Washington for his support. Their witness promotes the towns and establishes their towns' history. What can save these overlooked tracts of American history but, first, the awareness that they exist, and secondly, that they can once again thrive.
Abbey doesn't run to the post office anymore. In this her latter days, arthritis in her feet and legs prevents her from moving with the cat-like quickness that she possessed in her youth. As well, the post office is no longer run out of the house of a local family in her unincorporated town. That family lost the right to provide for the postal needs of the small town years ago. Now, once every two weeks, Miss Abbey gets a five-mile ride into town to get her mail from the makeshift post office in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center. That may change soon as well and require Miss Abbey and her friend to drive further to gather the few envelopes or parcels, including her tax refund, from the postal box. However, the United States Postal Service has an "either or" remedy. Miss Abigail could be driven to the brand spanking new, state of the art Postal trailer, that replaces the one room occupancy in the local community center, to gather her mail. Or, she can get a street mailbox so that she does not have to even drive into town to get her mail. What's the catch? If she gets the postal box then, she will also receive a new zip code. It will be the zip code of the neighboring jurisdiction. As the population has aged, the choice appears self-evident. Choose history and suffer inconvenience or choose convenience and watch a town die.
From house to house, for the sake of life, liberty, and the pursuit of convenience, the elders will watch their town disappear, right before their eyes. Their history lost to the economic development of more powerful partners--private and public--and to their ambitious, readily endowed neighboring county and town governments. A city created to protect those violently discriminated against because of the color of their skin in the early twentieth (20th) century watches as their past is violently seized because of the color of money in the early twenty-first (21st) century.
Their homes are forced into foreclosure. Despite low outstanding mortgage values, for they spent over thirty (30) years of their hardest labor paying down very high interest and slowly eroding the principle, they are unable to vanquish the high rates of property taxes, especially in the Liberty and Prosperity state. Unable to afford the high outstanding tax debt, resulting in tax auctions, or missed mortgage payments due to medical illness expenses or reduced income due to retirement, they surrender their land, their homes, their memories to the almighty developer. Miss Abigail must accept that her Zip Code will be changed from Whitesboro's 08252 to Cape May County's 08210.
Such a change would virtually eliminate the existence of the historical town.
A town whose citizens have suffered forced foreclosures, corrupt land acquisitions from neighboring towns and developers, and the absence of the most Constitutional protection--the power of local governance, it suffers the fate of many small unincorporated towns throughout the United States. One day, the elder's descendants shall only know the city by the remaining signs on the two-lane road mentioning its existence. A town ghosted. A people silenced.
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Kenneth McClenton
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