William L. Clay: “I rise to commend the Associated Press for a series of articles it ran late last year entitled, ``Torn from the Land,''…”

“I rise to commend the Associated Press for a series of articles it ran late last year entitled, ``Torn from the Land,'' which documented in great detail how private and government entitles cheated many Black Americans out of their land or drove them from their land through intimidation, violence and murder. The misappropriation of these lands, undertaken primarily in the South, began more than a hundred years ago and continued well into the 1960s. The lands and properties that were taken from African Americans were generally small, such as a small home, a 40-acre farm or a modest business. But such losses were devastating to families and to a people struggling to overcome the legacy of slavery. According to the U.S. Agricultural Census, in 1910 African Americans owned over 15 million acres of farmland, the greatest level of black landownership in our nation's history. However, as a result of the illegal land grabs and the discriminatory practices of the old Farmers Home Administration, black landownership today now stands at 1.1 million acres. The wholesale theft of land from African Americans is the greatest unpunished crime in our nation's sordid history of race relations. Landownership was the ladder to respectability and prosperity in the Old South--the primary means to building economic security and passing wealth on to the next generation. So when black families lost their land, they lost everything.”