Black farm ownership has declined by more than 90% since the 1920s, making it one of the starkest yet least examined examples of racial injustice in American history. This Essay argues that these losses are not the product of isolated discriminatory acts, but the consequence of a durable agricultural oligarchy: a system of concentrated economic, political, and cultural power that has structured American agriculture since the antebellum era. By...
Law and Slavery
In an era of reckoning and resistance, this Symposium Piece journeys through the rich terrain of Black protest and Afrofuturist imagination, uncovering a radical legal tradition rooted in historical defiance and visionary possibility. By analyzing Black resistance—from insurrections against slavery to today’s racial justice movements—through an Afrofuturist lens, it identifies three key dimensions of Black protest in the United States: perversion,...
In 1858, the United States Attorney General issued an opinion, Invention of a Slave, declaring inventions by African Americans, enslaved and free, unpatentable. Within a few years, legal changes that abolished the law of slavery rendered the opinion obsolete, and it became forgotten, dropped from legal memory. Combining history and Critical Race Theory, this Essay repositions the opinion as a remembered legal story and argues that law’s selective...