Say Something Real
Some Blacks Actually Received the Promised Land
By Michelle Bryant
Michelle Bryant
For most of my life, I’ve heard the idiom “40 Acres and A Mule”. In the Black community, the phrase always represented a broken promise and the fact that America would never make good on reparations due to formerly enslaved Africans. However, a new documentary sheds fresh light on the matter.
In 40 Acres and a Lie, a three-part series from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity, we learn “the history of an often-misunderstood government program that gave formerly enslaved people land titles, only to take the land back”, according to a blurb on Reveal’s website. Wait……. what?!
I would gamble that not many of us know that an estimated 1200 formerly enslaved Black people in this country actually did receive the promised parcel of land and a mule. According to Mother Jones, “the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres. Freedmen and women built homes, established local governments, and farmed the land. But their utopia didn’t last long. After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson, stripped property from formerly enslaved Black residents across the South and returned it to their past enslavers.”
Mother Jones goes on to report, “Over the course of two and a half years, a team of Public Integrity reporters, editors, and researchers identified 1,250 Black men and women who had earned land as reparations after the Civil War. From there, the team conducted genealogical research to locate living descendants of many of those who had received and then lost the land. For the first time, these living Black Americans were made aware of the specific land that had been given to and then taken away from their ancestors.”
Is the blood racing to your eyes yet? Having difficulty breathing? Does your head hurt as you wrestle with information about one more form of injustice leveled at the Black community, as they were exiting the institution of chattel slavery? I have no recollection of this section in my American History textbooks. Today, this information would likely be banned by school boards in red states and districts. However, the truth and truth-tellers always find a mechanism for the facts to be told.
Enter the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Record Group 105), also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established in the War Department by an act of Congress on March 3, 1865. They were responsible for the “supervision and management of all matters relating to the refugees and freedmen and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War,” In short, they were supposed to help formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient. It was in their hand-written notes and archives that information was found about the government’s initial efforts to provide the promised land and a mule. The mechanism that helped researchers sift through all the documents can be attributed to advances in genealogical research, the digitization of these documents and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The series, yielding much of this information, will unfold from June 15 – June 29. As we educate ourselves on Juneteenth, make sure you tune-in to learn the truth about that 40 acres and a mule.