Black People : 40 Acres and a Mule

[cherryblossom]

Forty Acres and a Mule


The orders were in effect for only one year.

In the Field, Savannah, Georgia, January 16th, 1865.

Special Field Orders, No. 15.

"...Less than a year after Sherman’s order, President Andrew Johnson intervened, and ordered that the vast majority of confiscated land be returned to its former owners. This included most of land that the freedmen had settled. The Federal government dispossessed tens of thousands of black landholders. In Georgia and South Carolina, some blacks fought back, driving away former owners with guns. Federal troops sometimes evicted blacks by force. In the end only some 2,000 blacks retained land they had won and worked after the war...."

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/forty-acres-and-mule

 

[cherryblossom]

"...Less than a year after Sherman’s order, President Andrew Johnson intervened, and ordered that the vast majority of confiscated land be returned to its former owners. This included most of land that the freedmen had settled. The Federal government dispossessed tens of thousands of black landholders. In Georgia and South Carolina, some blacks fought back, driving away former owners with guns. Federal troops sometimes evicted blacks by force. In the end only some 2,000 blacks retained land they had won and worked after the war...."

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/forty-acres-and-mule

And by now, even that number is considerably LESS because of the land theft in SC and GA.

There are Black families who are still fighting to retain their lands which have been in their families since the Civil War and before it.

 

[SophiaG]

I remember reading about this in my American History course in college. It was dissapointing to read about how the blacks had been given many rights after the civil war. and it was taken away. I don't think it was covered very much in my high school history courses.

I remember listening, fairly recently...within the span of a few months back, to an NPR newstation about some area in the south that blacks had been given land to. Some ecological society or...govermental bueareau involved in the preservation of species was trying to take land away from black people to turn it into a nature preserve because a threatened owl species lived where they did. The argument given by the african americans that lived there was that they had lived with the owl for many many years and posed no threat to it.