Reclaiming Beaches for the People on the Fourth of July

During these dog days of summer, millions of Americans will flock to the nation’s shores for comfort and relief. Who will go, where they will go, and who they can expect to find there speaks volumes about class in America. Now more so than ever, the distribution of people on America’s beaches each summer mirrors those bar graphs that illustrate the distribution of wealth in the nation as a whole. Long stretches of shore are the exclusive dominion of America’s super rich. A substantial segment is fenced off for the enjoyment of a shrinking upper middle class who can still afford to go on vacations or own second homes. What little remains is for the rest of us; and of that, a dwindling amount could be considered safe for bathing. My neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for instance, hugs the western shore of Lake Michigan. Yet few of my mostly white, well-to-do neighbors can be found bathing or picnicking on this urban shoreline (voted for the second year in a row as one of the nation’s most polluted). Those of us who can afford to will rent a cottage along a secluded, sometimes privately owned, beach, or stay in an expensive seaside hotel in one of America’s vacation destinations, where the price of admission includes exclusive access to a spacious, well-manicured beach. Meanwhile, our neighborhood beach plays host to the city’s working poor, mostly black and Hispanic, who come despite the occasional water quality alert, and despite the sorely neglected state of the beach itself, another victim of our city’s struggle to maintain basic public services in our age of austerity

The Power to Destroy: Discriminatory Property Assessments and the Struggle for Tax Justice

High assessments on African American-owned land became a common, if often invisible, feature of Jim Crow governance. Discriminatory modes of property taxation served as a weapon of social control, an instrument of land speculation and redevelopment, and a vehicle for the unequal distribution of public services. This essay traces the strange career of the property tax from the period of Reconstruction to the age of Jim Crow, situating racial differentials in the assessment and collection of ad valorem taxes within the broader framework of white supremacist governance, and provides a case study of property tax discrimination in civil rights-era Mississippi. In the summer of 1966, black residents of the town of Edwards, Mississippi, launched a boycott of local businesses in response to a series of discriminatory actions by town officials and local employers. The following year, Edwards’s board of supervisors retaliated by grossly inflating the assessed value on almost all black-owned homes in the town, an action that was ultimately upheld by the US Supreme Court in the Bland v. McHann (1972) decision. While mostly forgotten by scholars and left out of histories of the civil rights movement, the Edwards boycotts and resultant fallout shed new light on several key issues of importance to the history and geography of racism, state power, and the black freedom struggle in America. In particular, this essay argues, the actions of Edwards town officials reveals the bureaucratization of Jim Crow and the emergence of more subtle, and ostensibly legal, mechanisms of administrating racial privilege. Conversely, the story of Edwards’s black community, and its efforts to secure a more equitable distribution of tax revenues, testifies to the importance of fiscal policy and administrative reform and in the long black freedom struggle