America's Lost Black Towns Vol. 3 — Taken by Law & Concrete (Standard Companion Edition — EPUB Edition)

Not every lost town was burned. Some were taken by paperwork. Seneca Village was a stable, property-owning Black community in Manhattan — about half its Black residents owned their land — until New York seized it by eminent domain in 1857 to build Central Park, smeared its deed-holders as squatters, and wrote it out of the park's story for 150 years. In California, Willa and Charles Bruce built a beach resort for Black families in 1912; the city condemned it in 1924 on a park pretext, awarded them $14,500 of the $120,000 they sought, and left their lots under a lifeguard headquarters — until Los Angeles County gave the land back to their great-grandsons in 2022, in the rarest ending this series has: a return. And Africatown, Alabama, was founded by the survivors of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship, who bought land and built their Africa in America — a town that still lives, cut by highways and ringed by industry, whose founders' testimony, recorded by Zora Neale Hurston, was proven right when the ship itself was found in 2019.

All 3 chapters, full text (8,868 words). Every chapter closes with its receipts — where the record disagrees, the disagreement is printed, not papered over. The clean EPUB edition, readable on any e-reader, tablet, or phone.