Two weeks after the presidential election, white nationalist Richard Spencer held forth on a cable news show about how white people built America. "White people ultimately don't need other races in order to succeed," he told the audience of the black-oriented program,
NewsOne Now.
The exchange grew heated as host Roland Martin questioned Spencer's rhetoric: Didn't slaves help build America? Wasn't the nation's 19th-century economic boom propelled by the slave labor that produced the world's cotton on Southern plantations?
America's rise was "not through black people" and "has nothing to do with slavery," Spencer retorted. "White people could have figured out another way to pick cotton," he said. "We do it now."
He is in a position to know. Spencer, along with his mother and sister, are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana, according to records examined by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The farms, controlled by multiple family-owned businesses, are worth millions: A 1,600-acre parcel
sold for $4.3 million in 2012.
The Spencer family's farms are also subsidized by the federal government. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in US farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.