FORTY ACRES

FORTY ACRES AND A MULE PLUS INTEREST Attempts, desires for newly freed African Americans to organize own their own, independently of white people was first expressed in January 1865, to General Ulysses Sherman and to Edwin Stanton , War Secretary, as formal emissaries from Abraham Lincoln . That was where “40 acres and a mule” came from as a reparatory war measure exacted from rebels, this was agreed to by the Union. They wanted land, to be left alone. There, black ministers declared that the newly freed African Americans could already do for themselves all that needed to be done to survive . The blacks had long been doing for themselves, as slaves, as well as for their lazy white slave masters quite admirably. In fact so admirably had they done, that the mere thought of letting blacks alone to prove again a fact so obvious was anathema to white white supremacy politicians, former planters and businessmen. The Africans wanted the land that they had worked in that region as recompense for unpaid wages, for cruelty and abuses without number. But they never got the land in fee simple. Congress granted their land to auctioneers, developers, political cronies, former slaves’ owners; to anyone but the African Americans! The “contraband camps” that the blacks had established wherever they landed gave witness to the self-organization innate in these extraordinary people. In northern Mississippi there was a prosperous camp with school, churches, homes and stores, which was abandoned when Sherman moved out to fight. Another such “contraband camp” was in Hampton, Virginia , under a symbolic tree of renewed life from whence sprang Hampton Institute; from whence sprang Tuskegee and Booker T. Washington, the epitome of self-help and self -determination. Sadly, some whites were not happy with the idea of newly freed blacks being independent of precepts of white economic-political power sovereignty or of blacks being self -sustaining. In Wilmington , North Carolina in 1898; in Memphis , Tennessee in 1898; in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906; in East St. Louis, Illinois, 1917; Springfield, Illinois in 1908; in Springfield , Missouri, in 1906; or in dozens of other cities anywhere in that broad swath of vengeful history now cryptically called “The Red Summer of 1919” . This Red Summer was a sordid series of white coups, arsons, riots lynching against black cultural self-economic development that was too independent of white people. Since we could not be independent without getting burned out, bombed out, lynched out, shot out, taxed out, cheated out , prosecuted out of our property or lives by jealousy of whites, who used our tax dollars against us and against the law, we surrendered to our integrating within the white folks’ communities, schools, churches , businesses. Well that is how we are now, 2020, more or less: some more, most less! Forty acres and a mule with interest is our due, is what we again claim! Meeting between Black Religious Leaders and Union Military Authorities, January 12, 1865