At the beginning of the 1970s, college sports were on turbulent ground. “Colleges prepare for the impact of rising costs and more campus unrest,” warned the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was a bit blunter in its prognosis, reporting that “like housewives everywhere, athletic directors of the nation's colleges [were] having budget trouble.” National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Executive Director, Walter Byers, warned of “cadres of disgruntled athletes,” demanding rights, money, and control. Byers was also troubled by Title IX, the new educational amendment mandating gender equity in federally funded schools, including in athletic departments. “The possible doom of our collegiate sports is near,” Byers proclaimed. “There is not an athletic department in the country where officials are optimistic,” University of Michigan's Athletic Director (AD), Don Canham, lamented. Norv Richey, University of Oregon's AD concurred, declaring, “The future of intercollegiate athletics are in peril.”

Andrew Kahrl's timely book, The Black Tax, examines the racial disparities present in local governmental property tax systems. By examining the property tax regime, he enters the conversation about the role of tax policy in exacerbating the racial wealth gap. The Black Tax expands the conversation about analyzing tax policies through a racialized lens.

Andrew Kahrl has gifted the field a forceful book that urges us to remember the property taxes. The Black Tax tells us, “The property tax is the most local of all taxes” (5). More than that, though, the property tax is the most literal way that state policy hits close to home. Kahrl thus studies local taxation to show how white people wielded state power to threaten Black Americans’ tenuous grip on property ownership—and generate handsome profits along the way. The ends—dispossession of Black-owned property and unfair tax burdens—will surprise few readers. But the means—tax-buying, fractional assessments, and other bureaucratic technicalities—will shock, frustrate, and anger most. This is the force of The Black Tax: Kahrl reminds us that, for Black people as with other racialized minorities, the barriers to homeownership do not end when the sale closes.

Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is a sweeping and insightful history of the local property tax in the United States from Reconstruction onward that speaks eloquently to urban history, tax history, and histories of capitalism and race in the United States. Kahrl exposes the relentless process of dispossession and exploitation, captive taxpayers and fiscal apartheid within the local property tax that has overtaxed Black Americans by over $275 billion, cost $326 billion in land loss, and created a generational wealth difference compounded into trillions. But Kahrl is not focused only on individual loss or even community dispossession, but on entrenched systems of legalized theft built into the local property tax that have reinforced themselves over time through the most localized bureaucratic subjectivity and bias, such that poor cities are now left with few fiscally sustaining options other than preying on their poorest citizens.

Whether by reevaluating previously underappreciated factors or by uncovering new source material, historical scholarship occasionally makes immediate and simultaneous interventions in both academic and public-facing conversations.1 Andrew Kahrl's The Black Tax is one such work, and actually accomplishes these two tasks admirably. In the last two decades, scholars have investigated African American ownership of real property in land and homes, as well as the ways that governmental and private actors, policies, and practices have impaired Black people's ability to acquire and accumulate wealth in this country.2 This body of scholarship, alongside the work of public intellectuals, has served to jumpstart discussion around the issue of reparations.3 Prior to the release of Kahrl's illustrious book, however, no one had identified property taxes as lying at the very center of race-based structural inequality.4

When African-American history is done well, it allows us to see the places where inequality hides. Scholars in the areas of the history of capitalism, African-American history, and urban studies have popularized the language of historical phenomena such as white flight, redlining, and privatization, in the process of explaining the origins of contemporary challenges. A reasonably educated person understands that deindustrialization at mid-century led to job losses. Every May, pundits write essays about the failure to equalize schools as the nation memorializes the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Popular journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones owe their careers to their study of historical work in order to leverage public-facing conversations from reparations for slavery to the politicization of the teaching of civil rights. Essentially, good history helps us search for the state practices and policies that soften the blow of inequality, assault human dignity, and normalize poverty. In his deeply researched and thoughtfully written book The Black Tax, Andrew Kahrl addresses another obscure mechanism that has historically worked to dispossess and disadvantage African Americans across regions and generations, and has ensnarled both landowners and tenants. Kahrl's book forces readers and scholars to think about the ways that a lack of federal authority and will to protect Black citizens allowed states and municipalities to assess, tax, and place liens on Black property—from vacant plots to farm land to family homes.

First, I want to thank Modern American History co-editors Sarah Snyder and Darren Dochuk for selecting my book for this roundtable and assembling such an incredible group of scholars to read and comment on it. I drew heavily on these readers’ previous works when writing The Black Tax and held up their books as models of the kind of engaging and impactful historical scholarship that I aspired to achieve. Which makes their positive reactions to my book all the more gratifying, even as it makes my job here a bit harder. I have no complaints to respond to, no arguments to defend, no decisions or only a few omissions to justify or explain.

This article explores responses in the Black press to the rapidly expanding U.S. deportation regime during the interwar period. While their perspectives have been largely absent from scholarship on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators have historically been highly engaged with the issue. Black periodicals provided extensive coverage of the expulsion of Black immigrants, as well as of non-Black immigrants who violated the racial structures of American society (either through antiracist political advocacy or through interracial relationships). In doing so, the Black press insisted that deportation was a Black issue, and that antiblackness was central to the functioning of the early-twentieth-century immigration control system. By surveying roughly 1,100 articles on deportation in the Black press, I highlight how Black writers construed deportation as a powerful tool of white supremacy and a threat to Black immigrants and African Americans alike.

The death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement agents in 2020 and the racial tensions that followed it have again reignited the contentious debate about racism and society’s inability to find an enduring solution. This article is a novel effort to situate the debate in an interreligious context and contribute meaningfully to the search for a solution. Drawing from the Joseph and Potiphar’s wife story in Genesis 39 and Surah 12 of the holy Qur’an, the article shows the intersections of this patriarchal material with the axes of identity and marginality. Drawing from the multiple junctures of this intersectionality that include race, ethnicity, identity, and microaggressions, the article identifies in the scriptural texts seven resonances of contemporary racism that are often ignored or poorly understood in race discourse. Taking into consideration some meaningful solutions suggested by legal luminaries and behavioral scientists in their respective fields, the article augments these with a religious solution, pointing in the direction of a true penitential spirit, like the one demonstrated by Potiphar’s wife in the Qur’an. The suggestion is that a genuine turnaround (conversion) is also in the spirit of the ecclesial repentance that was practiced in the early church before some medieval abuses crept in. The article concludes that human agencies aside, ultimately it is God’s ability to bring good out of evil, the way God did with Joseph, that can bring an enduring solution to victims of racism.

At the height of the ‘global 1960s’, hundreds of African Americans moved to Africa in search of a refuge from racism and the opportunity to participate in anti-colonial politics. One of the most prominent figures in this movement was Maya Angelou. Nine years before the publication of her first book, Angelou lived in Egypt, then known as the United Arab Republic, where she worked as a writer, editor, and broadcaster at state-directed media institutions. She continued this work in Ghana, where her journalism and political writing situated the civil rights struggle in the United States within wider campaigns against racism and imperialism. Using previously unexamined documents from Angelou’s personal archive and surviving records of her political writing, this article sheds light on the role of African American activists in global anti-colonial networks and the challenges faced by radical journalists across the decolonizing world.

#BankBlack. #BuyBlack. In the wake of deadly police murders of unarmed Black women and men, calls for greater investment in Black business emerged as one panacea for the myriad divisions rending the very flesh of the American promise. In July 2016, hip-hop artist and business owner Michael “Killer Mike” Render issued a call to action days after the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. “We owe them our outrage,” he stressed in a call-in to a town hall meeting sponsored by cable television channels MTV and BET and hosted by a popular local Atlanta radio station. “But,” he countered, “we don't have to burn our city down.” Instead of burning, he challenged 1 million people to open a 100-dollar account at a Black bank. Days following Killer Mike's call to “bank Black,” about 8,000 Atlanteans opened accounts in Citizens Trust Bank, a Black-owned bank started in 1921. Riding a catchy hashtag and waves of discontent, the #BankBlack movement quickly spread beyond Atlanta. In less than a year, people around the world moved an estimated $60 million into Black-owned banks.

It is hard to review African American history without confronting the multiple meanings of debt. There was debt owed, debt paid, debt inherited, and debt hidden in the social tax associated with a subordinate status in the United States. All of these meanings are embedded in the murder of Elmore Bolling. Called Buddy by his relatives, Bolling defied probability by building a highly successful business in Lowndesboro, Alabama, in the 1930s and 1940s. He used debt in a conventional sense, to lease a plantation. Yet his entrepreneurial skills allowed him to offset that debt and amass wealth. He grew corn, cotton, and sugar cane. More impressively, he owned a general store, a gas station, a fleet of trucks, and a catering business, which enabled him to employ at least forty other Black residents. His business acumen allowed him to maintain $40,000 in the bank and another $5,000 in other assets, a remarkable sum for a Black man in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

Margot Canaday offers this new book as a kind of continuation of her classic 2009 study on the bureaucratic persecution of gays, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century. Rather than government documents, Queer Career draws on more than 150 oral histories of subjects recalling employment memories and complaints, as well as her signature exhaustion of the secondary sources.

On February 2, 2023, Ilhan Omar took to the floor of the House of Representatives to address what being an American meant to her. Responding to Republican efforts to remove her from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the representative for Minnesota's fifth congressional district asked, “Who gets to be an American? What opinions do you have to have to be counted as American?”1 In attacking Omar for her past comments on Israel and track record of criticizing U.S. foreign policy, House Republicans were conflating progressive politics with foreignness, arguing that this combination is subversive and represents a real threat to the American government and the stability of the nation.2 Indeed, the vote to remove Omar came just a few years after President Donald J. Trump had implored Omar and her progressive allies in “The Squad”—House Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”3 Acknowledging how her race and identity were once again being used by Republicans to question her Americanness and delegitimize her politics, Omar offered the following rebuttal: