In 1973, Annie Kennedy put down $2,000, her entire life savings, and secured a $10,000 mortgage for a small house on Long Island.

A housekeeper, Kennedy continued to work into her 70s to pay off the mortgage. But when she tried to sell her home in 1986, Kennedy was surprised to learn that the house was no longer hers. Kennedy hadn’t paid a $92.07 school tax bill years earlier—a bill she had never received. The debt had been sold to a tax-lien investor who snapped up Kennedy’s home for just $92.

All those thousands of dollars in mortgage payments “might as well [have been dumped] in a garbage pail,” Kennedy remarked.

In South Carolina, Evelina Jenkins had 66 acres of coastal land—land worth tens of millions of dollars today—legally stolen from her in a fraudulent tax sale in 1932. In Chicago, Louis and Doretta Balthazar lost the triplex where they had raised their nine children after missing a lone tax payment. The missed payment allowed the city’s largest tax buyer to purchase the building from under them.

The throughline in these stories? The victims of these predatory tax practices were Black.

Their stories are just a few of the illuminating and maddening accounts found in “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America,” Andrew W. Kahrl’s recent book about how our country’s racist taxation practices have impacted generations of Black people. On Thursday, Kahrl will give a book talk at Henrico’s Libbie Mill Library.

“This is a history of taxation in America as seen through the lives and experiences of Black Americans,” says Kahrl, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia, of his book. “At the same time, it’s a history of African Americans since emancipation through the present that is told through the fiscal lens. It looks at the entirety of the major issues, challenges, struggles and movements that African Americans have been a part of over the past 150 years.”

The book is a damning indictment of the systemic way that Black people have been the victims of discriminatory taxation, liens, property valuation, and underinvestment in their neighborhoods. These practices are one reason why establishing intergenerational wealth has been so difficult for Black families; one in four Black families has zero or negative net worth, compared to less and one in 10 white families.

One study finds that Black Americans were overtaxed by about $275 billion between 1870 and 2020 in 2023 dollars. Another found that the millions of acres of land that Black people lost between 1920 and 1997 would be worth roughly $326 billion today.

Kahrl’s book zeros in on local tax systems, which pay for education, clean water, sewage, public safety, and other public goods and services. Property tax is “ripe for manipulation and abuse and prone to inequitable results,” Kahrl says, because it’s locally administered and enforced.

Local governments have consistently overtaxed Black-owned homes and land while also failing to give Black citizens remotely close to their fair share of public goods and services.

Black people have also been the victims of the harshest consequences and most predatory laws when they fail to pay their taxes on time. Local governments sell liens on tax delinquent properties to private investors who then saddle the delinquent taxpayers with even more debt. When the owners fail to pay, the private investors take their property.

And these tactics have been deployed essentially since emancipation. After the Civil War, white Southerners painted Black people as “freeloaders” and Republican-controlled state governments as wasteful spenders of white taxpayers’ money in order to defeat Reconstruction.

This strategy, Kahrl says, was used to justify what he calls the “Jim Crow fiscal order.”

“You have African American disenfranchised populations that are flagrantly denied their fair share of public goods and services that tax dollars pay for, and, at the same time, are being shouldered with a disproportionate tax burden,” he says.

By promoting the myth that Black people didn’t pay taxes, white Southerners justified the limited funding they gave to Black schools and other public goods and services. Again and again, Kahrl writes of how the white parts of town got water and sewage lines, paved streets, sidewalks and electricity while the Black parts went without.

The “freeloader” myth is still very much a part of our politics today.

“This has been a canard that has been invoked repeatedly to justify regressive tax policies, austerity and deprivation not just for African Americans, but for a whole range of poor and disadvantaged populations across American history,” Kahrl says. “Readers will probably be familiar with this kind of argument, as it’s been invoked by the right in our lifetime. Going back to Reagan’s myth about ‘welfare queens’ and all that racially laden political talk that the right uses to justify cuts in social services for disadvantaged populations, to justify the use of regressive taxes in place of more progressive taxes on income and wealth.”

These taxation practices have made the transfer of intergenerational wealth more difficult. Early in the book, Kahrl references George Floyd’s great-great-grandfather who lost four acres of land he owned in North Carolina at a tax sale over a $18.83 tax debt; a single acre of land in the county sold for $62 at the time. The loss of land plunged the family into poverty.

And Kahrl warns that these taxation practices aren’t just some dusty old history. A 2020 study found that the assessed values of properties in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are 10 to 13% higher than those of white properties in the same jurisdiction, forcing Black property owners to pay an average $300 to $390 extra in property taxes annually.

In his book’s conclusion, Kahrl references events that took place in two American cities on the same date: Aug. 30, 2022.

On that date in Jackson, Mississippi, the city’s aging water system collapsed, an event that should have a ring of familiarity to all Richmonders. That same day, the school system of Philadelphia was forced to send home many of its more than 115,000 students because of excessive heat. The school system’s buildings, most of which were over 75 years old, lacked air conditioning.

In these cases, the majority-Black cities lacked the resources they needed to make repairs and upgrades to their facilities. White flight saw white people and middle-class Black people flee to the surrounding suburbs, cutting the tax base. Republican governors and state legislatures cut taxes on the state’s businesses and highest earners while also raising taxes on its poorest residents.

To Kahrl, these stories illuminate where America stands now.

“We could not be farther away from a time where we, as a country, recognize that we have collective needs and need to adopt national scale solutions,” Kahrl says. “Where we are today is a very bad place.”

Andrew W. Kahrl will discuss his book on Feb. 20 at Libbie Mill Library, 2100 Libbie Lake E. St., 23230. 6:30-7:30 p.m. Free. For more information, visit henricolibrary.org.