Historically Black towns and settlements, known by various names, such as Freedmen's settlements or Freedmen’s colonies, have endured significant economic, environmental, and social challenges to secure their place in the future. Continued economic, environmental, and climate threats jeopardize their ability to thrive for generations to come. What if a future were guaranteed for these communities? What would it take to achieve this? Repairing Roots: Historic Black Towns and Spatial Reclamation (full report) explores how these communities can guide national and local efforts for reparative spatial justice and emphasizes that their preservation and prosperity should be a top priority for policymakers, philanthropic organizations, and public officials. It calls for an approach led by these communities themselves, centering their voices in shaping the path to lasting repair and renewal.
A Brief History of Black Towns and Settlements
More than 1,200 historically Black towns were founded during the years of Reconstruction and at the end of the 19th century continuing into the early 20th century, but several were established long before the Civil War. Historic Black towns (both incorporated and unincorporated) can be understood as settlements that are predominantly inhabited and governed by Black people and were established to create safe and autonomous communities amidst widespread racial discrimination and violence. From coast to coast and in each pocket of the US, Black entrepreneurs, farmers, and professionals broke ground in new locations throughout Florida, California, Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond. In places like Oklahoma, for example, Black families and individuals thrived economically and politically without the violent oversight and control of white supremacist culture and policies.
Elsewhere, like Tamina, Texas, Black communities were able to create havens of economic and educational opportunities as a result of cheap land sales or state-sponsored promises of land allocation. For many other communities like Blackdom, New Mexico, however, escaping white supremacy was a driving motivation to find new pastures that held promises of safety and community stability. Today, more than 30 historic Black towns are documented to remain across the country, and they continue to serve as important spaces of living history, culture, tradition, and ancestral memories for local, state, and national communities. The exact number is not known—because of prominent challenges related to town archives, documentation processes, and constant threats of erasure—and is likely to be higher.
The profound threats confronting these communities require an approach that enables stakeholders to grapple with the conditions endangering their survival and actively support their future resilience and thriving. Reparative spatial justice provides a vital framework for addressing historical harms while forging inclusive, equitable spatial futures that encompass housing and land rights.
Root Causes of Existing Challenges and Systemic Dispossession
Employing a reparative spatial justice framework for Black towns and settlements requires a deep examination of the conditions that have hindered their survival and growth. By critically analyzing issues such as “underdevelopment” and embracing the deep metaphysical connections that Black towns and settlements have to land, place, and history, we can better grasp their significance in shaping policy, planning, and investment decisions. However, this work demands an honest reckoning with the historical processes that have pushed these homelands to the brink of erasure.
The dramatic loss of Black towns and settlements was far from accidental—a host of systemic challenges and mechanisms of dispossession have enabled the erasure of these spaces.
- Tactics of direct violence: Though often viewed as a tactic of the past, state-sanctioned mob violence—strategically employed to suppress Black progress and autonomy in service of white supremacy—has left enduring generational impacts. This violence was often coordinated with explicit state approval or tacit allowance and sought to dismantle Black autonomy, economic growth, and community stability.
- Racist planning regimes: Municipal boundary and zoning law manipulations, like extraterritorial jurisdictions, long impeded Black communities from accessing resources, economic and educational opportunities, essential services, and political representation.
- Forced sales and land loss: Our current property tax and legal system exploits the ambiguity of Black land titles by allowing legal proceedings (such as heirs’ property and partition sales) to involuntarily strip Black property owners of their land.
- Property assessments: Rampant tax assessment disparities for Black households have led to a significant overvaluation of properties, or an imposition of a “Black tax” in gentrifying communities, causing families to pay higher tax bills and experience increased financial strain or even land loss and displacement.
- Environmental injustice: Regulatory neglect and the exclusion of Black towns from land use decision-making processes have severely undermined their ability to protect themselves from environmental injustices and climate change-induced natural disasters. This lack of agency leaves these communities disproportionately vulnerable to harmful environmental impacts.
Reparative Spatial Justice: A Forward-Looking Perspective
Historic Black towns and settlements across the country have shown that the economic, physical, natural, and social threats they face do not mark the end of time for these communities or their futures. These communities are constantly innovating tools and strategies to carve their place in the future and rise above powerful oppressive forces. The following sections outline key tools and approaches that can further support the healing, flourishing, and growth of Black towns, settlements, and communities.
- Recognition, acknowledgement, and apologies are symbolic, yet important, steps that can bring communities together in shared understandings of history and drive collective action toward other meaningful reparative actions.
- Compensation and restitution aim to address the economic harms that have occurred as a result of acts of violence, exploitation, exclusion, or neglect that have caused loss of life, property, and livelihood.
- Renewed relationships to land by recognizing the land’s intersection with ancestral stories, movements, and traditions, and the significance of natural landmarks for their community’s story, can help reinvigorate these relationships.
- Participatory planning can address long-standing disparate power dynamics in local, regional, or state-wide planning decisions to provide more opportunities for various stakeholders, especially community members, to direct the usage of resources in an area.
- Planning and zoning tools, like safety zone redistricting and cultural district overlays, can transform the systems that enabled past harms to occur and recur by wielding these tools in pursuit of spatial justice.
- Heirs’ property and collective ownership mechanisms can shield communities from predatory property acquisition practices, help families see economic benefit from their land, and support community retention of land.
- Cultural and historic preservation through federal, state, and local reforms to establish and maintain historic sites and heritage districts can be one step to sustain cultural identities and history while also creating avenues for cultural tourism and economic development.
Recommendations
Policymakers, philanthropy, and public officials at all levels of government must embrace a more comprehensive understanding of the role that historic Black towns and settlements play in national housing and land justice movements. However, any solutions pursued must be guided by and implemented with the direct leadership of community members—especially the descendants of the community and formerly enslaved people—to ensure that initiatives, programs, and policies are community-led and are not co-opted, thereby avoiding further economic, cultural, or social harm. The following concepts are recommendations for various stakeholders engaging in these areas:
- Policymakers and public officials: Reckon with previous current and ongoing harm, consider the future impacts of policy and investment decisions, equitably distribute financial infrastructure costs, and ensure planning and zoning tools are used with shared decision-making authority.
- Advocates and organizers: Build coalitions and networks to amplify the education and awareness campaigns and legislative agendas of historic Black towns, and support community-led planning and development by creating streamlined processes for community members to engage in advocacy.
- Academics and researchers: Conduct research in partnership with communities and that aligns with community priorities, use the research findings to support reparative spatial justice policy changes, and facilitate more equitable relationships between institutions of higher education and the surrounding communities.
- Funders: Embed justice-oriented and flexible granting principles into funding opportunities, and provide expansive funding to community engagement activities.
- Developers, architects, and urban planners: Embed reparative planning and development practices into ongoing work, and cultivate long-term partnerships to ensure that planning and development decisions continue to meet community needs in the present and over time.
