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The Reels brothers grew up on waterfront land that their great-grandfather bought one generation after slavery. Their family has lived there for more than a century. But because it was passed down without a will, it became heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which descendants inherit an interest, like holding stock in a company. Without a clear title, these landowners are vulnerable to laws that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. One attorney called heirs’ property “the worst problem you never heard of.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized it as “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.”
What can heirs’ property owners do to protect their land?
Plan for the future.Write a will or prepare a transfer on death deed to help pass a clear title to the next generation.
Pay your property taxes. Visit your tax assessor’s office and make sure that your taxes are paid and that the address of the person responsible for coordinating bills is up to date.
Write a family tree. Find out the names on the deed for your land and lay out each generation of heirs that has followed. You can use legal documents from the county, like birth certificates and marriage licenses, as well as family letters, obituaries, information from genealogy websites and records from family reunions.
Create a paper trail to prove your ownership. If you inherited your property without a will or formal estate proceedings, many states allow for an affidavit of heirship to be filed in the property records to establish your ownership. The rules of when and how an affidavit can be filed vary by state.
Consolidate the ownership. Consider asking other heirs if they would be willing to transfer their interest in the property to those with the closest ties to the land. In many states, this can be done through a gift deed.
Manage the co-ownership. Talk to a lawyer you trust about your options, like creating a family LLC or land trust.
Track your expenses. If you pay for expenses on the property, like improvements to the homes or taxes, keep track of them. If a partition sale is started, you may be able to receive a larger share of the proceeds.
The Reels brothers grew up on waterfront land that was passed down without a will. (Wayne Lawrence, special to ProPublica)
What laws affect heirs’ property owners?
Fourteen states have passed the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which expands heirs’ rights in partition actions and can help heirs’ property owners gain access to Department of Agriculture programs. States where this has not passed include North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee.
The 2018 Farm Bill created a lending program that, if funded by Congress, would support local organizations providing legal assistance to heirs’ property owners.
About half of the states have Transfer on Death Deed statutes, which allow families to file a simple deed that automatically transfers title to real property upon the owner’s death, without having to go through probate court. The Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act has been presented as a model for how such statutes can be written.
What do advocates see as the next steps in helping heirs’ property owners?
Advocates have supported a number of possible legislative initiatives, including:
Funding to support an increase in the number of legal aid lawyers who help families clear title and make estate plans, and to support local legal education on maintaining clear title.
Legislation that creates an easier route for heirs’ property owners to access FEMA and home repair programs by allowing for heirship affidavits, a simpler, less costly process than clearing a title through the courts.
Legislation that creates alternatives to the formal administration of estates when a homeowner dies without a will.
Legislation that allows heirs’ property owners to access exemptions from property taxes that are available to other homeowners.
As the world grapples with uprooting systemic racism—a conversation catapulted into collective consciousness by the death of George Floyd—it is imperative that Black economists become household names. Their work will move us through the current moment to enable a long-lasting future that upends the oppression in the Black community that subsequently harms the economic system at large.
Economics—a discipline whose core focus is exploring who gets what, where, when, and why—is of great interest to Black people, who too often find themselves on the wrong side of America’s divides in wealth and income. But they’ve faced barriers in matriculating into the profession, as Lisa Cook and Anna Gifty Opoku Agyeman noted in their recent New York Times article, “It Was a Mistake For Me To Choose This Field.” The most recent data, from 2017, show that only 3.2% of doctoral degrees in economics are awarded to Black people each year. More than 52% of Black economists experience racism and/or discrimination, according to a 2019 report by the American Economics Association, and less than half of one percent of all top economics papers across a 30-year-period explicitly address race/ethnicity.
Nearly 100 years have passed, and not much has changed, since America’s first Black economist, Dr. Sadie T.M. Alexander, obtained her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921. She aimed to champion economic inclusion and justice, despite being denied the ability to practice as an economist in the pre-Civil Rights era. Even though she was deliberately excluded from the profession, she continued to use her economic expertise to recommend better policies for the working class such as the federal jobs guarantee, a concept embraced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that has been a foundational concept in progressive politics ever since.
Scholars Julianne Malveaux and Nina Banks have been committed to unearthing Alexander’s legacy through her speeches. Her passion for using economics to serve marginalized voices through policy is a common thread that connects the earliest work of Black economists as well as current scholars in the field. Phyllis Ann Wallace, the first woman to receive doctorate of economics at Yale University, focused on racial, as well as gender discrimination in the workplace. Abram Lincoln Harris, who published major economic studies in the 1920s and 1930s, made it a point to focus on “class analysis, black economic life, and labor to illustrate the structural inadequacies of race and racial ideologies.”
The list presented here, on Juneteenth, serves as a means to center and celebrate the work of Black economic experts across various specializations—both emerging and well-established. Their research and policy analysis should inform public discourse not only on how to improve the Black community’s reality, but in turn to make policy that is better for everyone. Please note: This list is certainly not exhaustive.
Each economist’s name is followed by their main area of specialization, in parentheses.
Bryan Frank
Dania Francis(Education) is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst whose work spans from the implications of educational outcomes for Black females based on the perceptions of Black girls in the classroom to economic reparations for African Americans. Her research interests include labor economics, public finance, economics of education, and racial and ethnic economic disparities.
Courtesy of Brown Dog Studio
Peter Q. Blair(Education and the Future of Work) is on the faculty in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, where he co-directs the Project on Workforce. He serves as a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Principal Investigator of the BE-Lab, a research group with partners from Harvard University, Clemson University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His group’s research focuses on the link between the future of work and the future of education, labor market discrimination, occupational licensing, and residential segregation.
EPI
Jhacova Williams (Race and Inequality) is an economist for the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE). In this capacity, she explores the role of structural racism in shaping racial economic disparities in labor markets, housing, criminal justice, higher education, and other areas that have a direct impact on economic outcomes. Williams’s research has focused on Southern culture and the extent to which historical events continue to impact the political behavior and economic outcomes of Southern Blacks.
Courtesy of Kristen Broady
Kristen Broady (Race and Inequality) is the dean of the College of Business and Barron Hilton Endowed Professor of Financial Economics at Dillard University. She is also the proprietor of KBroad Consulting. Her most recent publications include “Passing and the Costs and Benefits of Appropriating Blackness,” “Dreaming and Doing at Georgia HBCUs: Continued Relevancy in Post Racial America” and “Race and Jobs at High Risk to Automation.”
Justin Cook for The Wall Street Journal
William Darity, Jr., (Race and Inequality) is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. With well over 300 publications, Darity launched the sub-field of stratification economics in 2005. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. His most recent book, co-authored with A. Kirsten Mullen is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.
Courtesy of Darrick Hamilton
Darrick Hamilton(Race and Inequality), one of the country’s leading economists examining racial disparity, will serve as the founding director of the newly created Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at The New School. His research spans the gamut from stratification economics through economic and social policy, race, ethnicity and colorism, education, health, labor, asset and debt markets and family formation. His TED Talk, with over 1.5 million views, incited much conversation during the past presidential election season about how to end inequality in America.
Courtesy of Trevon Logan
Trevon Logan(Economic History) is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University. As the youngest president of the National Economic Association to date, he specializes in economic history and applied demography. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Courtesy of Willene Johnson
Willene Johnson(International Economics) is president of Komaza, Inc., a consulting firm that offers instruction and advice on economic and financial development, including microfinance, security sector resource management, and the role of economics in conflict management. Johnson has worked extensively in Africa, where she was first a volunteer teacher and more recently the U.S. executive director at the African Development Bank. She worked for twenty years in the Federal Reserve System, where her assignments included both research and operational responsibilities in international financial markets.
Courtesy of NYU Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Peter Blair Henry(International Economics) is a former dean of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where he is now the William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business. He’s the author of TURNAROUND: Third World Lessons for First World Growth. His research interests include international finance, emerging markets, international economic policy, globalization & trade, and macroeconomics.
Austin Thomaso/Michigan Photography
Susan Collins(International Economics) is the interim vice provost at the University of Michigan. She joined the Michigan faculty in 2007, serving as the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy until 2017. Before coming to Michigan, she was on the economics faculty at Georgetown University and Harvard University, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (where she retains a nonresident affiliation). She is an international economist whose research interests center on understanding and fostering economic growth in industrial, emerging market, and developing countries.
Courtesy of Sandile Hlatshwayo
Sandile Hlatshwayo(International Economics) has research interests in the areas of international trade, international finance, and macroeconomics. She is an economist at the International Monetary Fund, where she helps identify and evaluate global risks through predictive modeling, text-based analytics, and strategic foresight tools (e.g., scenario planning). She also sits on the board of Black Professionals in International Affairs and serves as an inaugural member of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession.
Michael Marsland
Ebonya Washington(Public Finance), a professor at Yale University, specializes in political economy. Her work explores the formation of political attitudes and how marginalized populations use the political system to attain economic needs. In a recent paper she turns her lens on her own profession, asking what economists can do to increase racial and ethnic diversity in their ranks.
Courtesy of University of Chicago
Damon Jones(Public Finance) is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He conducts research at the intersection of three fields—public finance, household finance, and behavioral economics—and focuses on topics of inequality. He was a post doctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (2009–2010) and is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Courtesy of Julianne Malveaux
Julianne Malveaux(Public Finance) has long been recognized for her progressive and insightful observations. As a labor economist, Malveaux has been described by Cornel West as “the most iconoclastic public intellectual in the country.” Her contributions to the public dialogue on issues such as race, culture, gender, and their economic impacts are shaping public opinion in 21st century America. She is the 15th president of the historically Black all women’s school Bennett College. Her notable works include writings on race, class, and Black women’s economics.
Courtesy of William Spriggs
William Spriggs(Labor Economics) is the former assistant secretary for the Office of Policy at the U.S. Department of Labor. He currently serves as the chief economist to the AFL-CIO and has been professor of economics at Howard University since 2012. Spriggs’s economic expertise lies in workforce issues, labor, tax and public policy. Prior to his position at AFL-CIO, he led economic policy development at several think tanks such as the Economic Policy Institute and the National Urban League. He has also held roles at the Department of Commerce, the Small Business Administration and the Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
JM Photo
Ellora Derenoncourt (Labor Economics) is an economist with research interests in labor economics, economic history, and inequality. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Industrial Relations Section in the Department of Economics at Princeton University. In July 2020, she will join the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy.
Courtesy of John Jay College City University of New York
Michelle Holder(Labor Economics) is an assistant professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York. Prior to joining the John Jay faculty, she worked as an economist for a decade in both the nonprofit and government sectors. Her research focuses on blacks and women in the American labor market, and her economic policy reports have been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Amsterdam News, and El Diario. Her first book, African American Men and the Labor Market during the Great Recession, was released in 2017.
Valerie Wilson(Labor Economics) is the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color. Prior to joining EPI, Wilson was an economist and vice president of research at the National Urban League Washington Bureau. She has written extensively on various issues impacting economic inequality in the United States—including employment and training, income and wealth disparities, access to higher education, and social insurance.
Courtesy of Dr. Lisa Cook
Lisa Cook (Macroeconomics) is a professor in the Department of Economics and in International Relations at Michigan State University. Among her current research interests are economic growth and development, financial institutions and markets, innovation, and economic history. She was a National Fellow at Stanford University and served in the White House as a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. She also served as President of the National Economic Association and is currently Director of the American Economic Association Summer Program.
Fanta Traore is an MPP and MBA candidate at Yale University. She co-founded the Sadie Collective, which addresses the underrepresentation of Black women in economics and related fields. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @TheFantaTraore.
Proud to note that of these 5 are OUR COMMON GROUND Voices (guest on our broadcast).
Drs. Lisa Cook,William Darity, Darrick Hamilton,Peter Blair Henry, Willene Johnson and William Spriggs.
In the middle of the 20th century, organized labor kept capital from capturing a larger share of the wealth that American industries were creating. In recent decades, the absence of a strong union presence has allowed the 1 percent to funnel that wealth upward uncontested. We can’t fully address this situation until we link the struggle against racism to the struggle for the right of all workers to union representation.To build the power needed to secure labor-law reform and an overhaul of trade policies, we need to integrate the labor movement into a broader coalition that includes civil-rights activists, women’s-rights groups, and faith-based organizations.A strong constituency for such a change certainly exists, although it has not fully coalesced. Recent polling shows that about 87 percent of low-wage black workers approve of labor unions, a level of support almost 20 percent higher than among white workers. When women of color make up three-quarters of the workforce, unions win representational elections at a rate of 82 percent, compared with 35 percent in places where white men make up the majority.
Many seemingly unrelated groups have already begun working together to forge a broader movement to build black worker power. Last September in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Institute for Policy Studies hosted “Black Workers Matter: Organize the South,” a conference that brought together several national labor unions, the NAACP, the Moral Mondays movement, Black Lives Matter, and other civil-rights and religious activists.As the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP and founder of the Moral Mondays movement, has pointed out, linking civil rights and worker rights hardly counts as a new idea. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called on the labor movement to invest heavily in worker organizing in the South, and the rallying cry at the March on Washington was “jobs and freedom.” To make black economic equality a real possibility in the 21st century, we need to infuse that idea with fresh energy.
The parallels between present-day business management practices and slavery have been persistently neglected in mainstream discussions about the history of U.S. enterprise.
The most striking parallel between slavery and scientific management can be found in the “task idea,” which Taylor described as “the most prominent single element in modern scientific management.” The task system is closely identified with Henry Laurence Gantt, who is well known today for the Gantt chart, a scheduling tool, which still bears his name. During the heyday of scientific management, Gantt developed a “task and bonus system,” which paired a flat task and a time wage with bonuses for overwork. Workers would be paid a base wage plus an additional piece rate for production above a certain minimum. By combining an achievable (rather than a maximal) task with bonuses, workers would enjoy the security of a minimum payment but also be encouraged to strive beyond it.
Economic growth can accompany choice, but it can also build on violence and injustice.
Yet while they introduced some novel details, neither Gantt nor Taylor created the task system. It has a much longer history and was one of the principal methods of organizing labor under slavery. Under the task system, an enslaved person would be assigned a set “task” or quota that he or she was expected to complete by the end of the day; this was in contrast to the gang system, where enslaved people labored under constant supervision for a set period of time. In some cases, slavers who used the task system even gave monetary bonuses for achievement above set targets. They “dangled the carrot” in a way that resembles not just Gantt’s methods but those of the gig economy today. Indeed, except for the base payment and the critically important ability for workers to quit, Gantt’s new system was in nearly every respect the same as the system used by some slaveholders, a fact that Gantt made no attempt to hide. Rather, he acknowledged that the word “task” was “disliked by many men” because of its connection to slavery, and he regarded this negative connotation as its “principal disadvantage.”
This is less surprising considering Gantt’s roots in the South. Born on the eve of the Civil War to a slaveholder in Maryland, Gantt’s father, Virgil Gantt, owned more than sixty men, women, and children. As Gantt wrote, “The term ‘task master’ is an old one in our language; it symbolizes the time, now happily passing away, when men were compelled to work, not for their own interests, but for those of some one else.” Gantt’s goal was not to abolish this old system but to adapt it to modern needs. As he explained, “The general policy of the past has been to drive, but the era of force must give way to that of knowledge, and the policy of the future will be to teach and to lead, to the advantage of all concerned.”
In a sense, scientific management replicated slavery’s extractive techniques while jettisoning the institution itself. Gantt’s rhetoric was not necessarily of distance but of progress; he purportedly liked to say that “scientific management marked a great step forward from slave labor.” James Mapes Dodge, a Philadelphia manufacturer and early supporter of Taylor, explained in 1913 that “we cannot tell who first liberated the germ idea of Scientific Management, as it was born to the world in the first cry of anguish that escaped the lips of the lashed slave.” Dodge’s reference was metaphorical, to a vague and distant past where slavery prevailed, not to the slave South. But he understood that “the present generation” had inherited “from the past the relationship of master and slave” and saw it as the job of scientific management to move beyond it.
The deep and persistent racial wealth divide will not close without bold, structural reform. It has been created and held in place by public policies that have evolved with time including slavery, Jim Crow, red lining, mass incarceration, among many others. The racial wealth divide is greater today than it was nearly four decades ago and trends point to its continued widening.
OCG 