Soon after slavery ended, Southern states created racially oppressive regimes that limited the economic progress of Black families—a set of rules collectively known as Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws intentionally prevented Black families from building generational wealth. The Jim Crow era persisted for 100 years and only ended with the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, which outlawed racial discrimination. Evidence on the long-run effect of racially oppressive institutions like Jim Crow finds that Black Americans’ economic status today depends strongly on their ancestors’ exposure to those institutions.

The racial wealth inequalities in the United States today are a direct result of centuries of racialized, exploitative social and legal structures—policies that set the foundation for a skewed distribution of land, labor, political power, and resource ownership by race. At the end of slavery, to stem the above inequalities, the United States entered a period of Reconstruction addressing the legacy. This short-lived period was marked by intense conflict and resistance from various White groups to end the effort, and the effort was ended. The loss of Reconstruction, which started between 1863 and 1877, caused conditions facing Black families to rapidly deteriorate through the late 1800s. Jim Crow social and legal structures to support White supremacy and Black subordination grew and became entrenched, and criminal laws and penalties in the South became increasingly harsh and targeted Black people.

Descendants of Eli Keen Jr., residents of St. Charles County, Missouri, are victims of a racially oppressive regime. The purpose of this crowdfunding request is to raise money for a battle to receive reparation for the 1900 Last Will and Testament of Eli Keen Jr., concerning deprivation created through an illegitimate doctrine (Jim Crow Law) employed by Missouri to renounce the will. Missouri courts relied on unconstitutional state statutes to create a disability, exercised contempt toward the U.S. Constitution, and acted in an unrestrained manner undermining the rule of law in the Keen descendants’ situation. Keen’s children were denied their inheritance without consideration of equal protections and other rights enjoyed by white citizens. Unbridled racist harm intended by state legislatures through the passage of statutes which specifically named certain of their citizens as if they were not United States citizens with U.S. Constitutional protections in the early 1900s flourished. Along with unconstitutional state statutes, supportive White supremacist judges completed the racist judicial systemic structures by issuing decisions which ignored U.S. Constitution protection when addressing people in named groups, ensuring equal justice was not for all. The state legislature provided the conduit which delivered inheritance deprivation to Eli Keen’s children. From statutes Jim Crow in nature, the Missouri court in Keen v. Keen ruled that the blood heirs named in Keen’s will were illegitimate non-relatives based on their race and the races of the parents, enforcing the unconstitutionality of the statutes. This orchestrated misfortune fostered by conscious hostile state statutes to deprive heirs of color, in this case, was successful in erasing 50-plus years of generational wealth building.

After generations of Keen landownership, in the year 1900, Eli Keen’s descendants were reduced to sharecroppers by a Jim Crow institution. The Missouri state statute in question was later held to be illegal and unanimously struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1970, long after the initial Keen descendants with clear knowledge of the situation were deceased. The Keen descendants have never been made whole by the state of Missouri for enabling the deprivation. With the racially oppressive makings of Jim Crow institutions declared unconstitutional by U.S. courts, the battle to have justice administered to the Keen descendants needs help. Your support sends a clear message that the descendants are entitled to equal justice per the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as other U.S. citizens enjoy.