Law Commons^™

The Power To Destroy: Discriminatory Property Assessments And The Struggle For Tax Justice, Andrew W. Kahrl

Studio for Law and Culture

High assessments on African American-owned land became a common, if often invisible, feature of Jim Crow governance. Discriminatory modes of property taxation served as a weapon of social control, an instrument of land speculation and redevelopment, and a vehicle for the unequal distribution of public services. This essay traces the strange career of the property tax from the period of Reconstruction to the age of Jim Crow, situating racial differentials in the assessment and collection of ad valorem taxes within the broader framework of white supremacist governance, and provides a case study of property tax discrimination in civil rights-era Mississippi. …