Can Land Repair the Nation’s Racist Past?

This story was originally published by High Country News in partnership with Capital B News.

Like many residents of Southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains, Jacques Powers wears clothes and boots painted with dirt and mud and gets around in a humming monster truck. But no matter where he goes, whether in these mountains or elsewhere in the state, Powers rarely feels like he belongs. 

Powers, who calls himself “Mr. Heinz 57,” has Black American, Portuguese Hawaiian and Irish heritage, and his wife, Angeletta, is a Black woman. There are about 40,000 people living in the five communities nestled under the area’s shadowed peaks. But most of them — around 70% — are white, while fewer than 2% are Black.  

And that is something the Powers family is seldom allowed to forget.

Powers, who was born in Hawai‘i, volunteered with Brotherhood Crusade, a Black community empowerment organization, in the 1980s, taking Black children from South Central Los Angeles into the San Bernardino Mountains. He was well aware of the structural racism that defines life for many Black children in California’s cities. The mountains appeared to offer some sanctuary from those socioeconomic disadvantages, thereby narrowing the racial disparity gap. By age 35, children who grew up in the mountain community of Crestline, for example, could expect to earn more than any of their counterparts across San Bernardino County, regardless of race. 

Crestline is the third-largest community in the mountains, and after Jacques and Angeletta Powers got married in 1981, they decided that was where they wanted to raise their children. 

They couldn’t afford land there, though, so in the late 1980s, they bought a starter home near Lake Arrowhead, in another part of the mountains. They already knew that racism was alive and thriving in the mountains: Residents and county officials had tried to stop the Brotherhood Crusade from establishing a permanent camp, after which the group sued for racial discrimination and was awarded $1.3 million. In Lake Arrowhead, local business owners occasionally refused to serve the Powerses, and every few weeks, Powers would find the lug nuts on his truck’s tires loosened. 

In 2019, flyers were left on local doorsteps, urging residents to “Save our land. Join the Klan.” That Ku Klux Klan slogan dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, when the federal government promised to give 40 acres of land to formerly enslaved families. (According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, San Bernardino County and neighboring Riverside County are currently home to a higher total number of active hate groups than the entire state of Mississippi.)

When I visited Powers, he arranged to meet me at the base of the mountains. It was for his protection, he said, as well as mine; he wanted to prepare me for possible confrontations with other local landowners. 

We talked for hours at George’s Burgers, a small, no-frills joint. There, at a graffiti-
etched table, Powers broke down 200 years of his family’s history. From a worn briefcase, he pulled an outline of his family tree dating back to enslavement; court documents filed by his great-great-great-uncle in the 1800s, accusing the U.S. government of racism; and his own lawsuit against San Bernardino County.

The Powerses’ current struggle dates back to 2004. After decades of saving money from their tree-cutting business, they finally purchased land in Crestline — 2.2 acres that included coveted water rights to the Santa Ana River. They had no idea that, back in 1979, the Valley View Park Mutual Water Company, which helps supply water to some of the mountain properties, had claimed ownership of the only road to the lot. Various legal documents say the road belonged to the county or the U.S. Forest Service, but in recent decades, neither entity has laid claim to it. The Valley View Park Mutual Water Company did not respond to several requests for comment.

The land’s previous owner, a white man, had used the road without any objection from the company. But according to the Powerses, around the time the property changed hands, the company’s tactics did, too. After a fire burned through the area in 2003, the water company purchased the lots surrounding the plot the couple would eventually buy. Court documents show that the water company did not build a gate across the road until the Powerses bought the land.

Following a 15-year legal fight that went all the way to the California Supreme Court, the court ruled in favor of the water company, leaving the couple locked out of their property. They now live in Arizona, a common destination for Black families pushed out of California by the high cost of living. In 2006, when the water company offered to purchase their land for about 20% of its appraised value, they became convinced that the company was deliberately squeezing them, hoping to buy the lot and its water rights for pennies on the dollar. 

Last year, the Powerses began working with Where Is My Land, a nonprofit group working to restore and expand landownership for Black Californians. The group rose to prominence after it helped the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce regain ownership of a property in Manhattan Beach, California, that the couple had purchased in 1912 to create a resort for Black people. In 1924, the city condemned the land by eminent domain, claiming it was needed for a public park, but left it undeveloped for decades. After the property was returned to the Bruce family in 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said that Where Is My Land’s work should serve as a model statewide.

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, California lawmakers have debated how to make material amends for the deep-rooted impacts of slavery and anti-Black racism, and many now argue that reparations should be made not in cash but with land. But that effort intersects with present-day racial tensions, the state’s housing crisis and the worsening effects of climate change. Meanwhile, Black families like Jacques and Angeletta Powers are asking what it means to belong in a place that is built around their exclusion.

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One of the most common arguments against reparations in California is that slavery was never explicitly legal in the state. But in the 19th century, at least 26 Black people were enslaved by the first white settlers in the San Bernardino Mountains, and slavery was practiced throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Even after California entered the Union as a “free state” in 1850, officials sought to keep free Black Americans from migrating there. 

The likelihood of Black reparations, in California or any other state, remains slim. But this year, California legislators earmarked more than $12 million for reparations in the state’s budget and introduced 14 reparation-based bills in the Legislature, including one that would have established an agency focused on increasing access to Black landownership. The bill unanimously passed the state Senate, though state senators abruptly pulled it before it reached Newsom’s desk. (State Sen. Steven Bradford, the chair of the Black Caucus, said it would be re-introduced next year, a non-election year with fewer hostile political ramifications. But opposition from a Trump administration and Newsom’s presidential aspirations might make final approval just as difficult.)

These steps represent only a fraction of the 115 legislative recommendations made by a state task force of civil rights leaders, legal experts and legislators, but they have helped move the issue from the fringes to the political mainstream. This year, a survey of 1,200 Black Californians by the California Black Power Network found that 90% say they believe some form of reparations should be enacted, and 85% would be more likely to vote for a politician who shared their position on the issue.

Some of the state’s most prominent Black politicians, including Bradford and Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, have argued that reparations should be made not with cash but by increasing Black landownership opportunities and restoring property rights to dispossessed Black families. They believe this would be the quickest and most efficient way to resolve the state’s racial disparities, which have left Black residents with shorter and poorer lives than any other racial group. “Reparations was never about a check,” Bradford said in 2023. In a state where property values are more than twice the national average, he added, “It’s about land.” Given that California homes have gained an average of $50,000 in equity every year for the past decade, increasing Black access to property could accelerate wealth accumulation and lower the racial wealth gap at least as efficiently as cash payments.

However, an even broader and deeper history of exploitation is embedded in the state’s landownership patterns. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Native peoples were dispossessed, enslaved and slaughtered, first by Spanish missionaries and then by white settlers. Unfettered logging, mining and dam building by settlers and, later, powerful state and corporate interests have damaged ecosystems, leading to costly disasters as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires, droughts and floods.

According to a study by researchers at Texas A&M University, overdevelopment has made California more vulnerable to environmental threats than any other state in the nation. Residents of color are particularly at risk: California’s Black and Latino communities are five times as likely to be impacted by floods, a hazard that’s compounded by the fact that they are also five times more likely to live within half a mile of a toxic site. 

At the same time, Californians are suffering from an acute housing shortage; according to one estimate, the state needs to build 3.5 million new housing units by 2025 to meet current demand and keep up with population growth. 

The scarcity of land and property has driven up rents and housing costs for residents of all races, forcing tens of thousands to flee the state. Many of those who remain have moved further right on the political spectrum; last year, the number of registered Republican voters increased in every single state and federal legislative district, while the number of Democratic voters fell by tens of thousands statewide.

Policy measures may address the worst effects of these intertwined crises, but experts contend that a fundamental shift in public attitudes toward land must accompany any lasting solutions to climate change and the state’s racial disparities. The notion that land is a commodity to be owned and exploited, they say, must give way to the idea that it is something to be worked with. 

The director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, john a. powell (who prefers not to capitalize his name), said that at the most fundamental level, reparations aren’t about cash or land. Reparations are about a sense of belonging — something that the Powerses and tens of thousands of other Black Californians have long yearned for. “Reparations is about repair and creating a world where everybody, including Black people, fully belong,” powell said. It is a world “where everyone has rights. A world where we respect the environment. And a world where the idea of dominating other groups or the land itself isn’t the dominant belief.” 

Across the state, Black, Latino and Indigenous activists are advocating for collective forms of reparations, such as land co-ops, where land is communally owned and members share decision-making and benefits. But as Powers sees it, this approach asks Black families to sacrifice their long-awaited chance to build personal financial and generational wealth. After watching generations of white families reap the benefits of land exploitation, that prospect is hard to swallow. Powers recognizes that the effects of white supremacy are felt throughout society, not only at the level of the nuclear family. But at the end of the day, he said, “I still want and deserve mine.”

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From her office in Los Angeles, Jade Stevens, 34, shared her family’s story with me. Between the early 1900s and mid-1970s, in what is now called the Great Migration, roughly 6 million Black people left the South, initially to escape racist violence and the lack of opportunity created by the region’s Jim Crow laws. As the economic boom fueled by World War II waned, tens of thousands of Black people, mainly from Louisiana and Texas, moved to California in search of jobs. Stevens’ family was among them.

Stevens’ relatives still own land in Louisiana, but she’s acutely aware that many Black families lost their land during the Great Migration. Researchers conservatively estimate that between 1920 and 1997, Black landowners lost $326 billion in land and associated wealth due to discriminatory U.S. Department of Agriculture lending policies and forced land sales. But the losses run much deeper than money and acreage.

“It’s contributed to this idea of not feeling welcome, not feeling like we’re safe” in either urban or rural places, Stevens explained. It’s also disrupted how Black folks relate to each other and to the land: Two and three generations after the Great Migration, rates of Black landownership are still lower than they were before the upheaval. Today, Black families’ homeownership rate is 30% less than that of white families. And since roughly 70% of Black people live in communities deprived of nature, they’re less likely to engage in nature-based activities.

“We no longer have appreciation for truly living with the land” through hiking or farming, or for the skills that come with it, said Stevens, including the ability to protect each other and the land itself from extreme weather. “And that’s primarily because many of us have had to move closer to the city, move across the country, for employment reasons, for safety reasons.”

Stevens, who has worked in communications for several politicians, including former state Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, says she likes to imagine what life would be like for her and her younger cousins if her family had never migrated, if they had be “more connected” to the things that matter. 

In 2021, she and three other California businesspeople — Blake Milton, Cameron Stewart and Reuben Stewart — founded the 40 Acre Conservation League, California’s first Black-led land conservancy. The group’s name derives from that Reconstruction-era government promise, never fulfilled, to grant “40 acres and a mule” to emancipated families.

This year, with $9 million in funding from the state and private conservation groups, the group is embarking on a project unlike any other undertaken by a Black-led organization in the state: It will steward hundreds of acres of undeveloped land. As part of California’s ambitious “30 x 30” goal of conserving 30% of the state’s lands and coastal waters by 2030, the group was granted ownership and management rights to a 650-acre property surrounded by Tahoe National Forest in Northern California’s Placer County. 

It’s a daunting task, especially given that the area has one of the nation’s highest risks of injury and death due to floods and wildfires. In 2021 and 2022, two fires in the Tahoe Basin hospitalized dozens of people and destroyed more than 1,000 structures, causing an estimated $1.3 billion in damage. The property itself was clear-cut for decades. Yet vibrant emerald-green meadows still thrive below towering ponderosa pines, firs and oaks, and the terrain provides refuge for rare species like the foothill yellow-legged frog and the southern long-toed salamander. With the help of state funding, the group plans to restore habitat, build hiking trails and create a nature center for environmental education.

Along the way, the 40 Acre League hopes to teach Black folks the skills they need to combat the effects of climate change, such as creating defensible spaces against wildfires, harvesting rainwater, and replanting native vegetation to restore soil health and prevent erosion. 

Stevens says this effort will serve the land in profound ways. “If we are able to bring more Black people into this space of stewardship to understand what it means to conserve the land, how to mitigate risks from climate threats, protect plant life and the animals, the whole world is going to care a little bit more,” she said. 

Wilson, who was instrumental in securing state support for the 40 Acre League, said she was slow to make the connection between reparations and access to undeveloped land and outdoor recreation. A stint on Northern California’s air pollution regulation board changed that: She saw how dramatically air and water quality affected life outcomes. “We were a state that intentionally ensured that Black folks in particular could not own land and, when they finally did, it was in areas with life-threatening environmental issues,” she explained.

While the league’s work is routinely cited by those crafting the state’s reparations plan, Wilson said, it might not be widely accepted as a form of reparations. “I don’t think our community’s saying, ‘OK, yeah, we got that, and this is reparations,’” she said. 

Stevens isn’t sure her group’s work qualifies as reparations, either. It offers benefits to Black communities, but those benefits don’t satisfy the traditional definition of wealth. “It is true that we can think about landownership in different ways,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be the original idea of providing individual plots of land, but there does have to be some kind of life-changing effect for individuals.” And, in America, she acknowledged, life-changing typically means money-making. 

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Landownership as a form of Black reparations is complicated by the fact that neither California nor the nation has offered proper reparations for the genocide of Indigenous people. Some representatives of Native tribes that have ancestral ties to the 40 Acre League’s property have taken exception to the group’s claims of ownership and stewardship, Stevens said, despite multiple meetings to discuss the issue. 

One tribe that calls the Tahoe Basin home is the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan. The Nisenan, like all of California’s Native peoples, were decimated by settlers’ campaigns of violence and cultural eradication. For decades after California achieved statehood in 1850, state-sponsored militias conducted deadly raids on Indigenous communities. Disease and starvation compounded the losses, and by the end of the 20th century, the state’s Indigenous population had plummeted from an estimated 150,000 to just 16,000.

“We’re still in the truth-telling phase of accepting the wanton murder and wiping out of California Native people,” said Shelly Covert, spokesperson for the Nisenan and the executive director of the California Heritage Indigenous Research Project. “Just like people in the Black community, we’ve been ignored and looked over, and gaslighted for generations, and offered nothing. So when you see the Black community, with a strong voice, getting land, it still stings, even if it is deserved.” The federal rights of Covert’s tribe were terminated in 1964, and even today it is not recognized by the government. 

At the same time, she said, the LandBack movement and other campaigns for Native rights have benefited from the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and she would like to see supporters of LandBack and reparations coordinate their efforts more closely. After years of crowdfunding, the Nisenan purchased 232 acres of their ancestral land in September for $2.5 million. The land, which is about 40 miles from the 40 Acre League’s property and was once owned by a Quaker school, will be developed for housing for elders and facilities to cultivate ancestral crops and  traditional medicine.

Reparations and LandBack activists in Northern California are finding common ground within the growing movement for “climate reparations.” The term, coined in 2009 by Black energy expert Maxine Burkett, refers to the disproportionate effects of climate change on communities already burdened by generations of colonialism and anti-Black racism. It acknowledges what Stanford University scholar Margaret Ramírez calls the “complex entanglements” of Indigenous, Black and Latino communities. 

One group working for climate reparations is the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a collective landownership group led by Indigenous women in the San Francisco Bay Area. The venture is funded primarily through the trust’s Shuumi Land Tax program, a voluntary “tax” paid by hundreds of people living on traditional Native land in the Bay Area as a way to acknowledge the genocide and dispossession that preceded them. The group has also called on Californians to support land return by establishing easements on their properties or including land transfers in their wills.  

Over the past few years, the trust has acquired more than 50 acres of land in areas that are primarily home to low-income Black and Latino families. On Sogorea Te’ land, Black, Indigenous and other communities of color work together to learn farming skills, traditional prescribed burning techniques and basket weaving. Volunteers cultivate native species, clear debris and clean up water sources — forms of stewardship that offer collective benefits, making them more compatible with the goals of LandBack.

Sogorea Te’ and other groups such as the California Environmental Justice Alliance recently persuaded California legislators to invest $270 million in “community resilience centers,” places like libraries, churches and recreational facilities that not only offer shelter during extreme weather but also provide a place for Californians of all backgrounds to learn preparedness skills and share their feelings about climate change. 

“These kinds of thriving hubs are really key in ensuring that Black folks, and all folks, can thrive and be out of the exposure of climate and environmental risks,” said Nile Malloy, climate justice director at the California Environmental Justice Alliance. “Everything we’re doing here is meant to repair harm, but also to build an economy to prepare people for this next generation where we want to see Black folks thriving.

 “Land is a big part of that, but with land comes a lot of power,” Malloy added. “With power comes responsibility — responsibility to conserve and maintain areas to build resilience for everyone.” 

Such efforts can offer substantial benefits, but since they go to communities rather than individuals and families, they are often difficult to measure in acres or dollars. As a form of reparations, they ask Black Californians to trust that state institutions and the state’s non-Black residents will finally do right by them. 

*   *   *

After our talk at George’s Burgers, I followed Powers’ truck into the mountains. My Honda Accord struggled to keep up on the winding road, which skirted the edge of a steep cliff. The higher we climbed, the crisper and cleaner the air became, and the larger the plots of land. 

We stopped on a small rise a couple of hundred yards from the plot the Powers family owns but is legally barred from entering. We looked down at a browning, unkempt area where dry downed branches were scattered on the forest floor like matches in a giant matchbox.

Powers, who was nicknamed the “Flying Hawaiian” by his colleagues in the tree-cutting business, gained a reputation in the mountains for the skills he had learned as a boy: Instead of climbing up and down the trees he trimmed, he swung himself between them. For almost three decades, he made a living by thinning trees near the land he would eventually purchase, helping hundreds of homeowners protect their homes from wildfire. 

At times, he said, he has felt at home in this forest. In the early morning, during the brief period after the fog evaporates but before L.A.’s smog overtakes the sky, it’s possible to see the Pacific Ocean from here. Not far belowground lies the Santa Ana River aquifer — a life-saving boon to the drought-stricken, wildfire-prone region. Despite the fires, despite the years of legal battles and threats of violence, he still sees this mountainside as a refuge from the gentrification and pollution that define life for people of color in the valley below.

About a century before Powers was born, his great-great-great-uncle, George Vashon, was denied entry to the Pennsylvania Bar because Black people weren’t considered citizens. As an 8-year-old on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Powers watched his family lose their home to eminent domain. That experience, he said, broke his father, a former musician who played with the likes of Louis Armstrong. “There’s really nothing that he could have handed down to us because he was always shortchanged, all across the board,” Powers said. 

Now Powers himself is fighting that harsh reality. His family’s situation isn’t uncommon, said Dreisen Heath, a researcher and activist who has worked with Where Is My Land: “Private companies have long taken advantage of individual landowners for their own capitalistic gains.” The group is working with four other families who are battling private interests, including timber companies and retail chains, to regain land or ensure access to it.

After the group helped the Bruce family’s situation gain national attention, Powers was hopeful. But in the 20 months since Where Is My Land began its publicity campaign on his behalf, just 360 people have signed a petition in support. “So far, nobody’s help has really gone that far,” he said. 

Despite their troubles, the Powerses still occupy a relatively privileged position in California. Since the couple bought the land in 2003, home values in the area have risen by 230%. Their possession of such an asset is even more remarkable considering that since the turn of the 20th century, Black Americans have lost 80% of the land they once owned; in California, Black landownership is roughly half that of white people. In San Bernardino County, where Black folks make up just 9% of the population, they account for 18% of those living without shelter on the streets. Some Black Californians worry that land reparations could worsen these inequities, widening the gap between rich and poor within the Black community. More privileged Black Americans may have better access to the documents needed to prove that they are descendants of slavery, and they’re likely to have a greater ability to navigate government bureaucracy and secure reparations than lower-income or less-educated Californians. 

By purchasing land in a state where land is so hard to buy, Powers hoped to gain the privilege that his family had been denied. He wanted to pass it on to his three children, following a tradition that has driven American landownership for generations. But that tradition, which benefits nuclear families at the expense of communities, has also led to the loss of skills and cultural traditions that, as the climate changes, may once again be needed for survival. “If our goal is to never be together, never to live all together, that means we don’t have true land practices,” said Covert of the Nisenan Tribe. “We have no responsibility to the land or each other. That’s where culture was always born, and that’s where culture and our future are going to be preserved.” 

The state’s current focus on individual Black landownership misses this, observed powell of the Othering & Belonging Institute. He would like to widen the conversation. “Addressing the crisis of Black life doesn’t mean ignoring Native Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, poor whites,” he said. “Everyone’s story has to count so that everyone belongs. The conversations about reparations, whether cash or land, are framed as a binary.”

Policymakers often resort to binaries, seeking clarity of intent and simplicity of implementation. But histories and experiences, whether individual or communal, cannot be reduced to binaries. Powers feels most at home far from the halls of government, swinging between trees to protect the Earth and his neighbors; in the mountains, he has experienced his strongest sense of belonging. Stevens, however, felt most supported while sitting in the state Capitol in Sacramento, hearing the “yes” votes as the Legislature approved funding for the 40 Acre League’s land purchase. She hopes that her work will make more people like her feel at home in their state. 

Regardless of the form reparations take or how they are distributed, they are intended to create a society where everyone belongs. By beginning to repair the past, said Powell, Californians can also prepare for their collective climate future. “In the face of these threats, it’s not enough to protect and valorize one historically harmed group,” he said. “It’s important that we actually see that everyone has to belong, unconditionally, to meet this moment.”