But the order was short-lived. President Andrew Johnson — who had owned slaves and publicly shared his beliefs of white supremacy — overturned the order before the end of the year and returned the land to the slaveowners and traitors who had originally owned it.
Again landless and in need of income, many former slaves were forced into sharecropping, a form of indentured servitude in which a landowner rents out plots of land to laborers in exchange for a portion of the crops produced. In addition to providing land, landowners often also extended credit to the sharecroppers to purchase materials like seeds and fertilizer from them.
Typically, this arrangement was only marginally better than slavery; landowners were known to charge unfairly high interest rates and intentionally underpay sharecroppers, keeping them in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.
Despite substantial hurdles, Black Americans still managed to acquire 15 million acres of land by , much of which was used for agricultural purposes. At the peak in , Black families owned and operated upwards of a million farms — about 14 percent of all farms at the time. The ability to grow crops and raise livestock afforded Black families not just food and financial security but also the opportunity for upward mobility.
This, too, was short-lived. Over the past century, Black farmers lost most of that land, leaving just 45, operators with a mere. Industrialization, which lured Americans of all races away from rural areas and into cities for better opportunities, is partly to blame. But there were other factors at play.
For one, most early Black landowners did not have legally-binding wills, largely because they did not trust the legal system. With multiple landowners who may not know each other, the possibility of unpaid taxes and, consequently, foreclosure is relatively high. Additionally, any individual owner can auction off their portion without consulting the other property owners. Knowing this, speculators and developers often coerce family members who have never even seen the property into selling their share for less than market value.
As a result, they lacked access to loans, crop insurance, technical assistance, market opportunities, and other critical resources made available to other farmers. This put Black farmers at a disadvantage and undermined professional success, forcing many to leave the industry.
Today, the average net worth of a Black family is only one-tenth that of a white family. As a society, we have pledged our commitment to ensuring that Black citizens are treated equitably in our criminal justice, education, health care, housing, and employment systems, yet we have fallen short on every count.
Following weeks of protests against policy brutality and other forms of racism, lawmakers, corporations, and individuals have renewed previous promises and made new ones. I believe black americans are due what was stolen from their families many many moons ago. The development of Black Codes and the use of year-long contracts to bind labor also made acquiring land nearly impossible. The federal retreat from land redistribution was not only a disappointment that cultivated a sense of betrayal, it was also a missed opportunity for economic reform that might have allowed Southern blacks to consolidate and hold political gains made during the early years of Reconstruction.
Map showing land set aside in orange by Special Field Order No. Do you find this information helpful? A small donation would help us keep this accessible to all. Forego a bottle of soda and donate its cost to us for the information you just learned, and feel good about helping to make it available to everyone! McCurdy, D. Forty Acres and a Mule. Previous Previous post: Nation of Islam —.
Johns river, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes [sic] now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States. The extent of this Order and its larger implications are mind-boggling, actually.
And what they wanted astonishes us even today. Who were these 20 thoughtful leaders who exhibited such foresight? They were all ministers, mostly Baptist and Methodist. Most curious of all to me is that 11 of the 20 had been born free in slave states, of which 10 had lived as free men in the Confederacy during the course of the Civil War. The other one, a man named James Lynch, was born free in Maryland, a slave state, and had only moved to the South two years before.
Their chosen leader and spokesman was a Baptist minister named Garrison Frazier, aged 67, who had been born in Granville, N. The stakes for the future of the Negro people were high. And Frazier and his brothers did not disappoint. What did they tell Sherman and Stanton that the Negro most wanted? The response to the Order was immediate.
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