The greatest welfare kings and queens of white history

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio. 

After retiring from his 20-year professional football career, the man who still ranks 22nd on the list of the highest-paid players in NFL history surveyed his career prospects and decided to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors. Favre passed on the family tradition of welfare fraud by allegedly using money designated for the poorest residents in America’s poorest state to build a volleyball facility for his daughter’s University of Southern Mississippi volleyball team. 

According to reporting by Mississippi Today, Gov. Phil Bryant’s welfare director “instantaneously committed $4 million in federal welfare funds to the Favre volleyball project” at the behest of Favre. Court filings allege that a nonprofit organization tasked with helping raise Mississippians out of poverty paid $5 million in welfare funds to the volleyball project and gave another $1.1 million directly to Favre. Still needing money, Favre suggested using prison labor, apparently interested in the loophole buried in the 13th Amendment that bans slavery “except as a punishment for crime.”

While these revelations left many people aghast, Favre is reportedly a direct descendant of Simon Favre, a French interpreter who died owning 57 Black people, and Simon Favre’s Native American mistress, a member of the Choctaw tribe that exiled their Black freedmen and banned them from collecting government funds. He is just the latest in a long line of white people who built generational prosperity by burgling the labor, intellectual property and wealth of Black people. 

But who are the greatest welfare cheats in history?

Well, for the sake of this argument, we used the Oxford English Definition of welfare—a “Statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need.” Although we initially wanted to list the top 10, we found it impossible to whittle our list down to 10. So here are the greatest 11 white kings and queens of welfare.

11. 400,000 acres and no a mule

Even before William Tecumseh Sherman took the advice of 20 Black ministers and issued Field Order No. 15, Black people were creating government programs to get their 40 acres. There was the Port Royal Experiment, the all-Black town of Mitchelville and the Boston Concern, projects that redistributed the captured and abandoned land of confederate traitors. But none of these rivaled the South Carolina Land Commission. 

For most of its existence, South Carolina was a majority Black state. After the 13th Amendment made them full citizens in 1869, the state’s Black electorate took over the legislature, created America’s first free statewide public education system and formed the South Carolina Land Commission. The SCLC used state funds to purchase land and resell it to freedmen using low-interest loans. Not only did this create a base of Black economic power,  the state actually made a profit! There was just one problem:

White people were in control. 

The first two corrupt commissioners embezzled funds and turned a blind eye to violent terrorist organizations that forced African Americans to make straw land purchases at discount prices. By the time Black educator and minister Francis Cardozo was put in charge, the commission was almost bankrupt. Cardozo had almost righted the land commission’s ship when the Compromise of 1877 ushered in the Jim Crow era. The white minority disenfranchised Blacks, seized control of the state legislature and sold most of the land to whites. Even though the freedman (including my ancestors) were able to purchase about 44,000 acres, confederate slaveholders ended up with more land than they did before the Civil War. Still unsatisfied, the white welfare cheats convinced newly-freed African Americans to work the land in a system that became known as “sharecropping.”

South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction welfare system for whites is the origin of the infamous lament: “We were eight years in power.”

10. Young, gifted and white

While journalists and politicians often point out the inequities in the American education system, we rarely acknowledge how white achievement is subsidized by Black taxpayers. Perhaps the best example of this is the infrastructure dedicated to high-achieving students in public schools all across America. 

Programs for gifted and talented students are almost exclusively populated by white, Asian and high-income children. Not only do white children benefit from these individual gifted and talented curriculums, but diverse cities like New York essentially created a network of segregated academies within the public school system, funded by the Black and brown citizens whose children are excluded. The result is a more unequal education system that catapults white kids toward a life of success while Black children fund other children’s generational wealth. 

And if you think it’s not welfare, consider how much money wealthy white families save on private education and tutors by sending their kids to these public schools. Remember that the tests that measure “gifts” and “talents” are racially biased. Remember that the entrance exams are essentially a measure of socioeconomic status and parents’ ability to pay for expensive exam preparation. Remember that Black families pay more in property tax, the “single largest source of local revenue for schools in the United States.” Remember that majority-Black school districts receive $2,226 less per student than majority-white districts. Remember that majority-Black schools are less likely to have AP or advanced curriculums. Remember that there is no universally accepted standard for what defines “gifted; it’s a “purely local responsibility and is dependent on local leadership.” 

In this “social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need,” the “people in need” are almost exclusively white.

9 . The road to white Wall Streets

Even when Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood was thriving, if you mentioned Black Wall Street, most people would assume you meant Durham, N.C.’s Hayti District, probably the most prosperous Black business district in America. Hayti’s Black-owned businesses were so successful that white businesses started popping up in the neighborhood. They wanted the Black dollars money, but they also wanted to enforce segregation laws and keep their employees all-white. On June 24, 1957, new Hayti resident Rev. Douglas Moore and six young activists walked to Royal Ice Cream Parlor in downtown Hayti, sat in the white section and refused to move. Owner Louis Colletta called the police, who arrested the students. Moore’s “radical” protest made Durham’s all-white city council stop working with Black leaders in Hayti on a planned urban renewal highway project that eventually displaced 4,000 families and 500 businesses. To be fair, while the highway served “white business interests” and dismantled Hayti, it linked the white downtown districts to the two largest predominately white universities, creating the affluent Research Triangle, consistently ranked as one of the best places to live in America…

For white people.

Since President Dwight Eisenhower created the U.S. interstate system in 1956, the resulting “highway boom” has destroyed more Black communities than hip-hop lyrics, Black-on-Black crime and sagging pants combined. We rarely mention how these publicly funded highways use public resources to create white wealth at the expense of Black neighborhoods in Winston-Salem, N.C., New Orleans, Los Angeles’ Sugar Hill and…well, Black neighborhoods in Little Rock, Ark., didn’t really suffer because the city had “no widespread…Negro sections of residence”…until it was segregated by three interstates.

When a curve was added to Interstate 40 in Nashville to avoid a white neighborhood, the residents of the historic area known as “Black Nashville” lost 600 homes, 30 apartment buildings, 100 businesses and easy access to three HBCUs. But the highway also funneled traffic to newly developed business districts and increased the value of homes in Nashville’s white suburbs. White homeowners and white-owned businesses actually profited from destroying Black history. 

On the bright side, the Royal Ice Cream protest—the civil rights movement’s first “sit-in”–inspired one of Moore’s college classmates (some guy named Martin Luther King Jr.) to use the technique in his quest to make America one of the best places to live. Or maybe he dreamed of a place described by W.E.B. Du Bois:

“Today, there is a singular group in Durham where a black man may get up in the morning from a mattress made by a black man, in a house which a black man built out of lumber which black men cut and planed; he may put on a suit which he bought at a colored haberdashery and socks knit at a colored mill; he may cook victuals from a colored grocery on a stove which black men fashioned; he may earn his living working for colored men, be sick in a colored hospital and buried from a colored church; and the Negro insurance society will pay his widow enough to keep his children in school. This is surely progress.”

Welfare queens ruined that.

8. Thirst traps

Speaking of Black neighborhoods, there are entire all-Black towns across America you can visit today…If you know how to swim. On second thought, even the best swimmer probably shouldn’t see the once-thriving all-Black town of Oscarville, Ga., that is now submerged beneath Georgia’s “haunted” Lake Lanier. 

The cluster of drowned ghost towns beneath South Carolina’s manmade lakes represents a small fraction of more than 100 Black communities that are underwater, mostly because states wanted to create water and power sources for white towns and cities. I would explain more, but Amber Ruffin* does a better (and funnier) job of recounting the history

*For transparency’s sake, I am a writer on “The Amber Ruffin Show” (The fact that she hired me was probably an act of welfare). 

7. God’s land Lotto

When your history teacher told you about the | today! 

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