The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Civil Rights conduct an investigation of the City of Dickson, County of Dickson, and State of Tennessee handling of the contamination in the Holt family wells and the protection of their civil rights.
Clearly, toxic racism is also stealing the Holt family’s property wealth. Unfortunately, the Holts are not alone as this practice is repeated from New York to California. Much of the black land loss is occurring in the South where 56 percent of the nation’s 40.2 million African Americans now reside. The black farmland theft was achieved largely through cheating, intimidation at gunpoint, even murder, and through manipulation by racist officials. A 2001 AP Torn from the Land series document a violent history of racial injustice that continues to have human consequences. In 1910, black Americans owned at least 15 million acres of farmland, nearly all of it in the South, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres.
The weapon used to steal the Holt’s land and diminish their transformative wealth was not a gun but a nearby leaky county landfill loaded with toxic chemicals. Nevertheless, the results are the same, loss of land. Forty years after Dr. King’s death, there still exists a hidden cost of being black in America.
A black tax still stymies wealth accumulation of African Americans who live in our nation’s cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Lacking the “transformative” asset of family wealth, such as land, millions of African American families must rely on their income and personal savings to qualify for homeownership, the greatest source of American family wealth.
Almost 80 percent of black children begin their adult lives with no assets whatsoever. The average black family holds only 10 cents of wealth for every dollar that whites possess. Wealth creates opportunity. Theft of black land translates into theft of black wealth. As was the case in Memphis forty years ago, the Dickson case in 2008 is more than a landfill struggle. Again, the struggle of the Holt family and other African American families in Dickson’s Eno Road community is about human dignity and human rights.
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