Historic Black Enterprise Magazine Covers: Black-Owned Farms, May 1978

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The editors of BE developed a groundbreaking cover story on the “black land drain,” detailing how the amount of land owned and controlled by African Americans declined from 16 million acres in 1910 to less than 5 million acres by the late 1970s.

The magazine advocated government action to protect black-owned farms, which had decreased from 218,000 at the beginning of the 20th Century to 79,000 roughly 70 years later.