Only Six Million Acres: the Decline of Black Owned Land in the Rural South

Someone needs to track black owned land in south. Black own farm land is regularly disappearing.

The BERC took the initiative in fundraising for a southern land bank, and secured a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers to do an exploratory study. The crisis motivating the interest in a land bank was the sharp recent decline in Black-owned land in the South from 12 million acres in 1950 to less than 6 million in 1970. The BERC’s study, Only Six Million Acres: the Decline of Black Owned Land in the Rural South published in 1973