Black Landowners Face Legal and Violent Dispossession in 1880s South

Black landowners who acquired property during Reconstruction face systematic dispossession through fraudulent tax sales, forged deeds, and violent intimidation. In Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, counties record rapid transfer of Black-owned farmland to white owners through sheriff's sales, disputed inheritance claims, and outright seizure. The Thomas Moss lynching in Memphis in 1892 will be paradigmatic: economic competition, not crime, drives the violence.