By: Imani Jones

“What you want? A house or a car? Forty acres and a mule, a piano, a guitar?” are lyrics uttered by Pulitzer Prize-winning rap artist Kendrick Lamar, in “Wesley’s Theory”; a shot toward racist institutions upheld by white supremacy in hopes of exploiting African American individuals. The capitalization of blacks in America has lasted since 1619 and is currently ongoing in actions of systemic oppression performed by the government. The discourse of reparations, introduced by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman to reimburse the formally freed slaves, is a recurring topic in contemporary race debates, but why was this idea originally proposed?

While many are familiar, with but unsure or uneducated about its origins, the phrase “40 acres and a mule” is a term used to describe the settlements given to black Americans to provide an opportunity to generate wealth and independence following the abolishment of slavery. Owning acres of farmland is a political schema representing freedom in all ways, including physical and economic, making this radical promise a step forward in allowing freed black individuals to be equal with their white counterparts. In 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Order No. 15, a monumental establishment declaring the confiscated land on the coastline stretching from Charleston, S.C. to the St. Johns River in Florida. The distribution of roughly 400,000 acres of Confederate land, divided into 40-acre segments, was then said to be given to freed slaves, granting them a building block to achieve separation from their suppressors. 

The ability to utilize expertise in ways to produce resources for the people you have suffered with — all while gaining economic independence and freedom — seems too good to be true, which was the unfortunate reality for the thousands of newly freed black families. Exactly how much land are we talking about? To introduce a digestible estimate, the value of the farmland said to be dispersed equals around $640 billion in today’s currency, according to the National Farmers Union article Juneteenth and the Broken Promise of “40 Acres and a Mule” published June 19, 2020. That is 640 billion dollars of wealth with the opportunity to be inherited from generation to generation. An amount of land equal to 400 basketball courts would provide self-sufficiency and the ability to sustain a free life. However, less than a year after this promise was made, Special Order No. 15 was rescinded following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination when his predecessor, President Andrew Johnson, dissented reparations. This resulted in the return of 400,000 acres of land to its original Confederate owners, a short-lived promise for the 40,000 black Americans wishing to gain self-legislation. 

Due to the unfulfilled vow of land, former slaves were forced into a system of sharecropping, immobilizing their improvements in society for decades to come. The system emerged after the Civil War and was introduced to freed blacks as land ownership by proxy, working for an owner of farmland in return for living accommodations. Similar to slavery, southerners had no interest in paying black individuals for labor they had once performed for free, essentially holding them captive as an outlet for accessing work. Freedmen had few choices in gaining freedom, and the sharecropping system would keep them in the hold of white southerners, further hindering the achievement of economic mobility. 

To provide reparations for newly freed slaves, Union General Sherman’s efforts were unsuccessful. The chance at true freedom was stripped away from the former slaves of America, and the racial wealth gap dating back to the origination of 40 acres and a mule persists in society today as the wish for reparations remains persistent.