Comment by wahern
Okay, but like with the banking myth there was no law or official government policy that specifically prohibited black ownership. And the only legally enforceable impediment after the 14th Amendment were racial covenants on private property (drawn up by property owners themselves by private agreement), which became void in 1948 after SCOTUS said it was unconstitutional for courts to enforce racial covenants.Notwithstanding that they were examples of extra-legal discrimination (in the sense of not being direct legal prohibitions), racial covenants and red lining also didn't just effect black Americans, though nationwide they were disproportionately impacted. I only point that out because most people would say it was incongruous to claim Jews or Polish or Asians were legally prohibited from owning land in many areas.
I think it's an important distinction because there are vestiges of redlining that persist today. First time homeowner mortgage subsidies, the first major stepping stone for building wealth for most people, effectively exclude many kinds of multiunit housing, such as condos and, IIRC until recently, attached housing like duplexes. This disproportionately impacts prospective urban black homeowners, and quite deliberately. Likewise, IIUC prefabbed homes or similar are excluded, which disproportionately impacts poor rural whites and blacks alike. There are legitimate concerns behind those restrictions, such as developer and rental fraud, just as nominally there were legitimate concerns behind redlining, namely sustainability of property valuations. Though in all these cases it's obvious the reason they persist(ed) as-is is for largely discriminatory reasons, as the legitimate substance of the concerns could be addressed. At the same time, we wouldn't say they legally prohibit ownership; if you're wealthy enough they're no impediment at all, just like redlining and covenants were no impediment if you were wealthy enough (racial covenants could be overcome by just buying up all the adjacent property so there was no other property owner to enforce the covenant; the government couldn't by itself enforce such covenants, only adjoining property owner "beneficiaries").
Perhaps counterintuitively, black letter property law was one of the legal areas most resilient to both racial and sex discrimination. The 1800s saw some regression, but that didn't last long, often because courts themselves couldn't tolerate the illogic. People criticize it, but property is indeed sacrosanct to American legal and political culture, and it was very difficult to carve out exceptions that permitted blacks and women to be excluded without threatening the underlying principles of the system that secured owners' rights. That's why prejudiced treatment tended to come in the form of private, regulatory, or extra-legal discrimination, which arguably persists today in the form of restrictive zoning and related development policies which not coincidentally are impediments to free & clear property ownership, just enough to be tolerable to the well-off while disproportionately impacting the real targets.