Earlier this month, Vanderbilt Law school hosted Andrew Kahrl for its annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture. Kahrl—a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia—discussed his recent book The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America. The book argues that structural racism in local property tax systems has laid the groundwork for and perpetuated other Black American civil rights struggles throughout history.
Kahrl began with a story of a woman named Evelina Jenkins, who owned 66 acres in South Carolina that she inherited from her great grandfather. Jenkins entrusted a white lawyer to take care of her paperwork including taxes, because she had no formal education. The lawyer intentionally failed to pay Jenkins’ taxes with the money she gave him and eventually bought the land, which was developed into multi-million-dollar homes. Jenkins was later kicked off the land and spent the rest of her life living essentially penniless in a mobile home on her daughter’s property.
It was stories like those of Jenkins—which Kahrl noted occur by the hundreds—that inspired the law professor to write his book. He wants readers to not only learn about the history of property tax systems but also how it ties into to Black Americans’ fight for justice and equality.
Kahrl elaborated on how local taxes have been a significant source of public revenue throughout American history, and how those who oversee tax assessments wield considerable power .
“People who administer and enforce local taxes are uniquely immune from outside interference, supervision, or regulation at the federal level,” Kahrl said. “[This immunity] makes the [property] tax uniquely susceptible to manipulation and abuse.”
This abuse, Kahrl argues, was directly aimed at black American land owners. It served as a means through which land was repossessed for default on tax payments, or through which they would collect extra money so it could be spent on white amenities, including public education and public infrastructure.
“We can think of local tax officials as a sort of instrument to a freedom to dominate,” Kahrl said. “The freedom that local autonomy allowed a white majority to yield over [and] disenfranchise black populations. Those in charge of spending the public’s money enjoyed another kind of freedom, the freedom to deprive, [because] for all that African Americans paid, they received little to nothing in return.”
Kahrl contended how, through this lens of deprivation via property tax systems, we can further understand many other black struggles for equality. He established links to other issues at the center of the Civil Rights movement and tax systems. He also highlighted how this issue has prevailed throughout history in one form or another throughout the 20th century and even now.
“As long as the fiscal health of American cities and towns are tied to conditions in housing markets, which they are through property tax, places with larger minority populations and higher rates of poverty will be at an inherent permanent disadvantage.”
Kahrl offered solutions, including the recreation of tax assessments—some of which have not been rewritten or re-evaluated for decades—and reducing the importance of property taxes on the fiscal health of cities. He advocated for a creating a system that has a floor (represented through a dollar amount) that no community will fall below, something instituted in other countries.