African American poetry addresses dispossession through themes of enslavement, labour exploitation, family separation, exclusion from wealth, cultural erasure, and denied citizenship. The concept extends beyond material property to emotional and symbolic forms of loss, including stolen identity or interrupted continuity. It helps interpret poetry where deprivation is historical and structural rather than merely personal misfortune.

Dispossession in African American poetry encompasses not only the theft of land (through post-Reconstruction terror, redlining, urban renewal, and eminent domain) but the broader removal of rights, safety, identity, and belonging. The destruction of Black Wall Street is a paradigmatic instance, but poets also address the more chronic, diffuse dispossessions of poverty, incarceration, and cultural erasure. Students should trace how dispossession poems negotiate between documentary specificity and symbolic resonance. Related terms include Black Wall Street, plantation memory, enslavement memory, carceral imagination, and return migration. Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay "The Case for Reparations" provides useful historical context alongside primary poetic texts.