Hey y'all from NPR, I'm Sam Sanders, it's been a minute.

Today we're going to talk about farms and race and the Mississippi Delta.

My guest is Van Newkirk, he writes for The Atlantic and he's out with the cover story

for the magazine, all about those three things.

The article is called The Great Land Robbery.

The shameful story of how one million black families have been ripped from their farms.

This piece chronicles how over decades through legal and illegal means, through government

programs and individual actions, white people in Mississippi basically swindled black farmers

out of thousands and thousands of acres of farmland.

The Scott family plays a big role in this story.

They were one of the largest black land owning families in the state of Mississippi.

This family descends from Ed Scott's senior.

He was born in 1886, just one generation removed from actual slavery.

That Scott's senior built a farming empire that by the time he died in 1957 was more than

a thousand acres.

The Scott family, like many other black families, lost a lot of that land.

So much so, and in such predatory ways that eventually the federal government had to pay

the Scott family millions of dollars.

The story of the Scott family and thousands of other black families in the Delta, lose

in their land and fighting to get it back.

It is a story that is hugely relevant to our politics right now.

And conversations about systemic racism and inequality and reparations.

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