Biography

Andrew Kahrl is a professor of History and African American Studies. He specializes in the history of race and inequality in the twentieth-century US, with a focus on housing and real estate, land use and ownership, and local tax systems. He is the author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Harvard UP, 2012), which received the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award; Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018); and The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U. Chicago Press, 2024). Kahrl served as the Principal Investigator and co-author of the African American Outdoor Recreation National Historic Landmark Theme Study for the National Park Service. His research and writing appears regularly in media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Boston Review. Kahrl teaches courses on the history of race and real estate in the US, local politics in America, US urban history, Black landownership, and African American history since 1865.

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The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2024
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo213447492.html