It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC

Centennial series, 100 years of 100 things. And since it's Black History Month, we'll look at a

major issue at the root of our racial wealth gap today. It's the first of several hundred years

of 100 things. Black History Month segments will be doing this month. Today, it's thing number 65,

housing inequality. Our guest today is Bernadette Atuhane. She is property rights scholar and professor at USC's

Gould School of Law. She also leads the grassroots Coalition for Property Tax Justice and the Black

Homes Matter campaign and joins us today to discuss her new book. She's got a brand new book,

Plundered How Racist Policies Undermine Black Home Ownership in America. And in it, she retells the

story of two different families, and we'll invite your personal stories as well to contribute

your oral histories here as we do in these segments. Two different families in Michigan in this

book, one black, the other Italian, both with roots in sharecropping. Through these personal

accounts, we learn how housing policies like zoning ordinances, redlining, and what she calls

predatory governance resulted in generational wealth for one family and poverty for the other.

Professor Atua Henne, thank you so much for joining us.

Welcome to WNYC and our 100 Years of 100 Think series.

Brian, thank you for having me.

And let's begin where the stories of your subjects begin more than 100 years ago, 160 years ago, after slavery was abolished in the United States.

Many newly freed enslaved people became sharecroppers, sometimes even on the same land they used to work when they were enslaved.

What was this practice and when did it end in this country and how is it relevant to the story you're telling?

Well, Plundered is really the story of two grandfathers, like you said, who were both sharecroppers in their native lands,

and both came to Detroit

to work at Ford Motor Company's River Rouge factory in the early 1900.

...