EP 4: Black Land Loss

When Lee got the results back from his DNA test, he was stunned to discover that he had pages and pages of white cousins. All his life he’d been under the impression that 95% of his DNA traced to West Africa. This discovery opened up a new historical pathway, one that traces all ...  Show more

Rules were a major part of Lee’s household growing up. But it wasn’t until he started to dig into his family’s history that he began to realize that the rules that he was expected to follow had a long, dark history. In this episode, Lee speaks with historian Dr. Daina Ramey Berry ...  Show more

More than a century and a half after the promise of 40 acres and a mule, the story of black land ownership in America remains one of loss and dispossession. June and Angie Provost, who trace their family line to the enslaved workers on Louisiana’s sugar-cane plantations, know thi ...  Show more

Agriculture was once a major source of wealth among the Black middle class in America. But over the course of a century, Black-owned farmland, and the corresponding wealth, has diminished almost to the point of near extinction; only 1.7 percent of farms were owned by Black farmer ...  Show more

Simon Winchester explores how humans’ quest to own land – from enclosure and division to violent seizure – has wreaked irreparable changes through history   Simon Winchester, author of Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, explores how humans’ quest to own l ...  Show more

The Provosts, a family of sugar-cane farmers in Louisiana, had worked the same land for generations. When it became harder and harder to keep hold of that land, June Provost and his wife, Angie, didn’t know why — and then a phone call changed their understanding of everything. In ...  Show more