Sherman’s special Field Orders, No. 15

July 16, 2024 1:36 PM

40 Acres and a Lie: A government program gave formerly enslaved people land after the Civil War, only to take nearly all of it back a year and a half later. Reporters with Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal tracked down the people, places, and stories that had long been misunderstood and forgotten, then asked their descendants about what’s owed now.

Accompanying podcast episodes in partnership with Reveal:
40 Acres and a Lie Part 1 Our historical investigation found 1,250 formerly enslaved Black Americans who were given land – only to see it returned to their enslavers.
40 Acres and a Lie Part 2 We trace “40 acres” land titles to a staggeringly beautiful sea island off the coast of Georgia that’s now a wealthy gated community.
40 Acres and a Lie Part 3 Calls for reparations were ignored for decades. Now, local governments are taking up the cause – and outrage is growing.

posted by hydropsyche (2 comments total)

Widely publish and share the exact location of reparation land stolen from freemen. Looking at that map, it is much of the entire coast of the south.

It is concrete stolen property, and those who are occupying it should be aware that the property was stolen (without proper reparation) from a freemen. That their title is tainted; they bought land that was stolen from a freeman, or bought it from someone who did so, etc.

Build monuments of the theft by Andrew Jackson and the betrayal of the freedmen. Mark the borders of the stolen land.
posted by NotAYakk at 1:58 PM on July 16 [8 favorites]

the treaties got broken.

In Louisiana, the lands were never subdivided. in part due to the fact that the Confederacy gave up New Orleans and Louisiana, and so the plantations were swiftly Union plantations as early as 1962.

And in part due to the economics of Sugar cane. it makes no sense to have small plots of sugar, since the crop rots in the field if not harvested swiftly. And all the sugar must be fed into a giant, boiling, polluting refinery.

These plantations are now occupied by Shell, Dow, Monsanto/Bayer, Marathon, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, China, and Exxon,, as well as the Louisiana State Prison, and are the source of gasoline, plastics, formaldehyde, pesticides, ethylene oxides, neoprene, and fertilizers for the united states. Forensic Architecture did some wonderful mapping of the interaction of these climate doomsday machines with the Black cemeteries and burial grounds that they overlay.

Forensic architecture has mapped many of the cemeteries and potential gravesites, based on the field surveys done by the Union army and the United States Coastal and Geological Survey, and some routine burial site logics.

It's a different logic, but these plantations are now being purchased by Black historians, and a lot of this is in Clint Wilson's new book, How the Word is Passed.

Of course, the current governor of Louisiana is a labor broker for the petrochemical plantations. Plus ca change.

But I wonder if similar maps could be done for the Sea Islands / Golden Islands of the Atlantic, although I am unsure if the USCGS mapped cemeteries on these Islands in 1877 as they did the Mississippi River --would anyone know? This would be a good project to pitch to Forensic Architecture if the brief tenure of the United States CGS on the islands produced other survey documents.
posted by eustatic at 7:36 PM on July 16 [6 favorites]