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The order was rescinded by Andrew Johnson in the fall of 1865.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.
Many factors have contributed to the loss of black land over the last century or so since formerly enslaved people and their descendants began to acquire land. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a long, documented history of discriminatory practices against black farmers. In fact, in 1982, black farmers received just one percent of all of USDA’s farm-ownership loans. These practices, in part, are credited for “playing a role in removing black farmers from the American landscape.” In 1997, 400 black farmers filed a class-action suit (Pigford v. Glickman) against the USDA, alleging that the agency had denied them loans based on race. They won up to $50,000 for thousands of farmers with individual claims. But it paled in comparison to the additional $1.25 billion settlement they were awarded in 2010 during the Obama administration. Other factors included the “Great Migration” of blacks from the South to other parts of the country.
But the lesser-known issue of heirs’ property also played a role, allowing untold thousands of acres to be forcibly bought out from under black rural families—often second-, third-, or fourth-generation landowners whose ancestors were enslaved—by real-estate developers and speculators.
By one estimate, 81 percent of these early black landowners didn’t make wills, largely due to a lack of access to legal resources. Their descendants then inherited the land without a clear title, and it thereby became designated as heirs’ property.
Heirs’ property is essentially a legal nightmare for families to navigate. Heirs’ property owners are limited in what they can actually do with their property, they are not eligible to apply for state or federal housing aid, or many of the programs offered by the USDA. And, not coincidentally, more than 50 percent of heirs’ property owners are black and the descendants of formerly enslaved persons. In Charleston County, South Carolina, there is an estimated 105,000 acres worth of heirs’ property alone.
“So [they’re] already hampered because [they] have heirs’ property,” explains Jennie L. Stephens, [the executive director of The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, based in Charleston County, South Carolina], “but now [they’re] sitting here with these hundreds of acres, and [they] can’t do anything with it.”
It’s bad enough that the federal government couldn’t manage to keep its word to black people almost 150 years ago when it promised them the land they asked for. But this is yet another way government at federal, state and local levels work to keep black people disenfranchised. Land that people have been on for generations gets traded away, sold, stolen right from under them or they have no real legal claims to it. The debt that this country owes black people can never truly be paid in full, but we can start by giving these families some legal access to the land that they are rightfully entitled to.