Black farmers in America continue to wait for their 40 acres and a mule that will never come
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Black folk across the country are well familiar with the notion of “40 acres and a mule.” Referring to the federal government’s promise of reparations in the form of land to newly freed slaves, it was a promise that was short-lived. The idea was born oBlack farmers in America continue to wait for their 40 acres and a mule that will never come
Black folk across the country are well familiar with the notion of “40 acres and a mule.” Referring to the federal government’s promise of reparations in the form of land to newly freed slaves, it was a promise that was short-lived. The idea was born out of a discussion between General William T. Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and 20 leaders in the black community in Savannah, Georgia, during January of 1865. The proposal was the idea of those black leaders who, when asked what they wanted for their people following the war, responded that having land, maintaining it, and laboring on it was the best way that they could provide for themselves. They wished to have this land and live away from whites. Their desire was granted as Special Field Order No. 15 on January 16, 1865, and later approved by President Lincoln. And by June, “40,000 freedmen had been settled on 400,000 acres of ‘Sherman Land.’ ” By the way, Sherman later ordered that the army could lend the new settlers mules; hence the phrase, “40 acres and a mule.” The order was rescinded by Andrew Johnson in the fall of 1865. But the story is relevant today more than ever, as black people in the south continue to fight for their 40 acres and a mule, so to speak. In the 45 years following the Civil War, freed slaves and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land across the United States, most of it in the South. Land ownership meant stability and opportunity for black families, a shot at upward mobility and economic security for future generations. The hard-won property was generally used for farming, the primary occupation of most Southern blacks in the early 20th century. By 1920, there were 925,000 black-owned farms, representing about 14 percent of all farms in the United States.[...] By 1975, just 45,000 black-owned farms remained. “It was almost as if the earth was opening up and swallowing black farmers,” writes scholar Pete Daniel in his book Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Implicit in the decline of black farming was the loss of the land those farmers once tilled. Today, African Americans compose less than 2 percent of the nation’s farmers and 1 percent of its rural landowners. Read more