Black Tax: Andrew W. Kahrl at IU Indianapolis

IU Indianapolis Chancellor’s Diversity Speaker Series presents:

Andrew W. Kahrl at IU Indianapolis

Tuesday, Sep. 17, 2024, at 6 p.m. Doors 5:30 p.m.
Madam Walker Legacy Center
Free and open to the public

Are you available to help out? Then signup to volunteer.

IU alumnus Dr. Andrew W. Kahrl, Ph. D., is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the history of race and inequality in housing, real estate, and local tax policy and administration in the US. He has also researched and written on the social and environmental history of beaches, outdoor recreation, land use and development in the coastal US.

Kahrl recieved the 2013 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians for his book The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (UNC Press). He also authored Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP), and The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (University of Chicago Press). Kahrl served as the principal investigator for the study of the history of African American outdoor recreation for the National Park Service.

In his book The Black Tax, Kahrl tells the long history of Black Americans as local taxpayers and Black history through the lens of local tax systems. It focuses on three related and unresolved problems:

• over-taxation of Black homes and neighborhoods
• maldistribution of the local public goods and services
• exploitation of tax delinquency laws

His book explores these topics and explains how they have fueled racial inequality and undermined Black struggles to build wealth from Reconstruction to the present. Read his Op-Ed in The New York Times on the inequity of property taxes.

Join us in person Tuesday, Sep. 17, 2024, at 6 p.m. at the Madam Walker Legacy Center. Conversation moderated by Dr. Lasana D. Kazembe, Ph.D., associate professor of Urban Education and Africana Studies.

Brought to you by the IU Indianapolis Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion