Keller Easterling

ATTTNT is a land reparations infrastructure informed by a period of land activism growing out of the Civil Rights Movement. Black land ownership dropped from 16 million acres in 1910 to 3 million acres in 1970. Activists traveled to the South to fight for civil rights but stayed on to expose forms of land theft and generate cooperative organizations to sustain the rural Black economy. While a constant undertow of white supremacist violence abetted by government agencies prevented further retention or restoration of land, their detailed work identified assets for reparations while also developing the Black institutions to manage those resources. Much of this land returns to areas weighted with recurring traditions and multiple efforts to resist and survive—markers of harms committed and debts incurred even after slavery. ATTTNT claims three ribbons of existing public land that were often scripted with white narratives—the Appalachian Trail (AT), the water route of the Trail of Tears (TT), and the Natchez Trace Parkway (NT)—to form a 3000 mile long spine that might now have a reckoning with those Black and Indigenous histories as it is thickened by reparation land trusts. A collaboration between Morgan State, Yale, and a consortium of HBCUs uses GIS, among other tools, to map and materialize a scar across the country and a land infrastructure that might begin to address an incalculable debt. ATTTNT is also a planetary formation that considers reparations as way to address the root causes of climate change.
Website team: Keller Easterling, Alvin Ashiatey, Bianca Ibarlucea, Nicholas Arvanitis, Hima Goburru