Before Black Lives Mattered, the acronym BLM usually referred to the Bureau of Land Management, an agency in the Department of the Interior that manages more than 10 percent of the nation’s land as well as mineral resources located under another 19 percent of the nation. After the creation of the national forests, national parks, national monuments, and fish & wildlife refuges, the BLM was formed in 1946 to manage the remaining federal lands.
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The BLM manages areas that were never claimed as a railroad land grant, under the Homestead Act, or under some other law, leading people to sometimes call them “the lands that no one wanted.” In some cases that is true, but in other cases someone might have wanted the lands but laws such as the Homestead Act restricted the number of acres that a settler could claim for themselves. Continue reading
