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The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

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A Black man wearing overalls leans against the handle of a plough, a mule and another man in the background.
Black landowner and farmer in Georgia, 1941. Library of Congress.

Peak of Black community land ownership and farming.

1919

The Story of Rural Health
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Black landowner and farmer in Georgia, 1941. Library of Congress.

In 1919, Black families own 16-19 million acres of land within the United States (14% of all agricultural land). There are 218,000 Black farmer-owners or partial owners of that land, most of them in the South. This acreage will decline every subsequent year due to white supremacist terror campaigns, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) loan discrimination, and many other forms of systemic racism.