Unequal tax burdens were designed to thwart Black independence by making it impossible to get an economic foothold. Expropriation of Black land was also the goal, as lost Black property was often added to the holdings of the system’s white beneficiaries. The disparities generated by the tax system were not subtle. Kahrl cites the 1928 assessments in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where property owned by a Black land-development syndicate was marked up “to nearly three times its market value and twenty times the assessed value of comparable white lots.” These audacious injustices were perfectly legal and implemented by respectable white citizens firmly at the top of local social hierarchies.
Structurally racist policies denied Black people access to the goods of communal life—swimming pools, libraries, schools, and sanitation—that their taxes were disproportionately paying for. Jim Crow school funding epitomized this dynamic, as relatively lower assessments on white property meant they paid proportionately less into the system. White politicians colluded with school boards, redistributing the proceeds from Black taxpayers to comparatively over-resourced white schools. Such educational plunder was not a niche practice confined to backwards local clerks. It was institutionalized and brazen. Writes Kahrl: “Between 1880 and 1910, one economic historian estimated, ‘black taxpayers were subsidizing white school systems in every southern state.’” The substandard education Black students received from this system imposed a kind of double tax, as families attempted to make up for these imposed deficits by scrounging to supplement teachers’ salaries. Kahrl notes that Black families were “in a constant state of fundraising” because their taxes went to pay for white children’s school supplies. Libertarian fever dreams of taxes as theft were not entirely false, but they were profoundly misplaced. Herrenvolk democracy ensured that the state was not a race-neutral tax arbiter, and white representatives had no problem plundering Black children’s schools to augment their own children’s education.
Schooling was not the only public service subsidized by Black taxes that accrued to white Southerners’ collective benefit. Across the South, the quality or mere existence of municipal services followed the color line. Black communities were routinely denied equal access to basics like clean water, streetlights, and functioning sewage—services that their taxes paid for in white neighborhoods. Squalid living conditions in Black neighborhoods, like open sewers spilling onto unpaved roads when it rained, were caused by resource theft but blamed on Black residents’ supposed laziness and inability to self-govern. Thus, segregation facilitated resource extraction while creating the deteriorating social conditions whites used to justify segregation in the first place. Lacking municipal resources wasn’t just inconvenient—it was dangerous. Low water pressure in Black communities meant house fires couldn’t be put out, and poor sanitation could be the difference between an annoying infection and a fatal one.