Historical Context

Timeline of land ownership:

1820 – 1863: Pre-Civil War
Prior to the Civil War, the Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state.

Mexican American war between the United States and Mexico (April 1846–February 1848) stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845.

Donation Land Claim Act of 1850
1861 – 1865: Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States from 1861 to 1865, fought between northern states loyal to the Union and southern states that had seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

Homestead Act of 1862
1863 – 1865: Emancipation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Forty acres and a mule is part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a post-Civil War promise proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, to allot family units, including freed people, a plot of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha). Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War.
1863 – 1880s: Reconstruction
The Reconstruction era was the period in American history which lasted from 1863 to 1877. It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights.

Lincoln assassination – April 15, 1865, Petersen House, Washington, D.C.

13th amendment – Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

Southern Homestead Act of 1866 

KKK – Founded in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for Black Americans. 
1870s – 1860s: Jim Crow
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Oklahoma land grab - The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 was the first land rush into the Unassigned Lands. The area that was opened to settlement included all or part of the Canadian, Cleveland, Kingfisher, Logan, Oklahoma, and Payne counties of the US state of Oklahoma.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27–30, enacted April 9, 1866, was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the American Civil War, to protect the civil rights of persons of African descent born in or brought to the United States. This legislation was passed by Congress in 1865 and vetoed by United States President Andrew Johnson. In April 1866 Congress again passed the bill to support the Thirteenth Amendment.

Johnson again vetoed it, but a two-thirds majority in each chamber overrode the veto to allow it to become law without presidential signature. John Bingham and other congressmen argued that Congress did not yet have sufficient constitutional power to enact this law. Following passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, Congress ratified the 1866 Act in 1870. 

The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the President of the United States to subdivide Native American tribal communal landholdings into allotments for Native American heads of families and individuals.
1900/Turn of the Century
Morrill Act of 1890 (the Agricultural College Act of 1890 (26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. § 321 et seq.) expanded this model—land grants for universities (agricultural and technical schools) and founding of several Black colleges.
1912 – 1930s: WWI/Great Depression
World War I, also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war that lasted from 1914 to 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history.

The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting about 15 months from spring 1918 to early summer 1919, it infected 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time.

The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of 6 million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. 

Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933. Prohibitionists first attempted to end the trade in alcoholic beverages during the 19th century.

The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in US history. It began in 1929 and did not abate until the end of the 1930s. The stock market crash of October 1929 signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. By 1933, unemployment was at 25 percent and more than 5,000 banks had gone out of business.
1930s: The New Deal
The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. It responded to needs for relief, reform, and recovery from the Great Depression. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). They provided support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly. The New Deal included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. New Deal programs included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Redlining in the 1930s. In the United States, redlining is the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector, to residents of specific neighborhoods or communities, either directly or through the selective raising of prices.
1939 – 1945: WWII
The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans. The original G.I. Bill expired in 1956, but the term "G.I. Bill" is still used to refer to programs created to assist U.S. military veterans.

Executive Order 9981 is an executive order issued on July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. It abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces. The executive order led to the end of segregation in the services during the Korean War
Late 1950s – 1960s: The Civil Rights Era
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.

FICO (legal name: Fair Isaac Corporation), originally Fair, Isaac and Company, is a data analytics company based in San Jose, California focused on credit scoring services. It was founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. Its FICO score, a measure of consumer credit risk, has become a fixture of consumer lending in the United States.

Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the term "white flight" became popular in the United States. They referred to the large-scale migration of people of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions.

Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the Interstate Highway System, is a network of controlled-access highways that forms part of the National Highway System in the United States. Construction of the system was authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the nation's premier civil rights legislation. The Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, required equal access to public places and employment, and enforced desegregation of schools and the right to vote.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 is a landmark law in the United States signed into law by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots. April 11, 1968
1970s – present: Post-Civil Rights
Early 1980s: Reagan Era/Recession
The early 1980s recession in the United States began in July 1981 and ended in November 1982. One cause was the Federal Reserve's contractionary monetary policy, which sought to rein in the high inflation. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis, stagflation began to afflict the economy.
2000: Turn of the Century
Rise of credit—1989 implementation, and would evolve into today's most popular scoring model, the FICO Score from Fair, Isaac, and Company

USDA suits—Pigford v. Glickman (1999) was a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging racial discrimination against African-American farmers in its allocation of farm loans and assistance between 1981 and 1996. The lawsuit was settled on April 14, 1999, by Judge Paul L.

Heir laws—The term heirs-at-law is used to refer to those who would inherit under the state statute of descent and distribution if the decedent dies intestate (without a will), and they may or may not be beneficiaries under a will. A lineal heir is someone who inherits in a line that ascends or descends from a common ancestor.
2008 – 2009: Economic Downturn/Housing Crisis
The United States subprime mortgage crisis was a nationwide financial crisis which occurred between 2007 and 2010, and contributed to the U.S. recession of December 2007 – June 2009. It was triggered by a large decline in home prices after the collapse of a housing bubble, leading to mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures, and the devaluation of housing-related securities.
2020: Covid-19 Pandemic/Shutter in Place