Black Landowners Face Legal and Violent Dispossession in the 1880s South

Black landowners who acquired property during Reconstruction face dispossession through fraudulent tax sales, forged deeds, and violent intimidation. Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia counties record rapid transfer of Black-owned farmland to white owners through sheriff's sales and disputed inheritance claims. Economic success itself provokes violence, as the Thomas Moss lynching of 1892 exemplifies.