Historian Plumbs Tax Records for Patterns of Racial Discrimination

Kahrl, an associate professor and joint apointee in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, specializes in African-American history and teaches about segregation and discrimination in housing and real estate. He has published one book, “The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South,” has completed another on desegregating Connecticut beaches, and is researching a third on how tax liens and tax sales became a tool used by predatory land speculators to acquire black-owned land.

“My interest has always been in making boring topics interesting,” Kahrl said. “I think some of the best history writing is that which takes these issues that, on the surface, seem to be mind-numbingly boring – such as tax assessments. But you need to look at what the consequences are, of the impact on communities trying to become stable and build up wealth.”

Kahrl’s research explores the use of municipal power to discriminate, limit development and restrict people to certain geographic areas. Kahrl started out researching the effect of segregated recreation facilities in the South, where blacks were excluded from white resorts, beaches and swimming pools and where black entrepreneurs, in response, developed their own properties and facilities. His research spanned from the 1890s through the 1960s, with most of his focus on the period from 1920s through the 1960s.

“You have, on the one hand, a growing demand amongst African-Americans in the South for summertime leisure activities and leisure spaces where they can go without fear of harassment or assault,” he said. “And then on the other hand, you have African-American landowners who are well-situated to provide those services. So you see waterfront landings being converted into seasonal enterprises. You see these commercial enterprises take shape that are black-owned and for a black consumer audience.

“When I began studying the history of beach segregation and the formation of separate black leisure spaces in the Jim Crow era, I was mainly interested in learning what took place in these spaces – the sights, the sounds, the music, the cultural dimensions of leisure,” he said. “But I quickly learned that space itself – and the land, in particular – formed a critical part of the story, and that in order to understand how these places came into being and how they fell apart, you need to understand the history of its ownership and commercial development.”

He had assumed that as blacks integrated white recreation areas, the black recreation facilities died because blacks stopped going to them.

“As I quickly learned, however, the demise of these places – and blacks’ ownership stake in coastal property – was anything but inevitable,” he said. “Many of these places were legally stolen from black people by private investors working in concert with local officials.

“From this revelation, I came to see the entire history of these places differently, and gravitated away from the cultural dimensions of black leisure to the economic and environmental issues surrounding coastal real estate and development in the 20th century.”

After integration, many of the owners fell prey to predatory land speculators who often acquired the valuable beachfront property through subterfuge. Local officials played a role through the power to tax and assess. Kahrl found examples of local officials who assessed black property owners at highly inflated rates in an effort to tax them off the land. Sometimes the overassessments were subtle; other times they were flagrant.

“This practice was pervasive,” Kahrl said. “It was something that was taking place throughout the South and it is clear that it is discriminatory in nature. African-Americans were consistently taxed higher on their property than white homeowners and landowners in the same neighborhood.” ...