Reparations for Black Americans
In early 1865, a group of Black ministers met with Union leadership in Savannah, Georgia, to voice the most pressing needs of formerly enslaved people in post-Civil War America. Their priorities? Freedom from white domination, education, and land ownership. [ 1 ] This meeting led to the plan known as “40 Acres and a Mule,” which set aside 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed Black families. So began the first program of reparations to Black Americans in the United States. This Union-sanctioned redistribution of land was fleeting. President Johnson overturned the plan just a few months later, dispossessing Black people of land they had forcibly worked for generations. Most plots returned to the hands of earlier white landowners, and Black families had little choice but to work as sharecroppers. For more than 150 years, the federal government has failed to fulfill the promise of reparations and address the brutal harms of slavery and its legacy. As a res...