Article: 40 Acres and a Mule: How the First Reparations for Slavery Ended in Betrayal

Forty Acres and a Mule

Article: 40 Acres and a Mule: How the First Reparations for Slavery Ended in Betrayal

04/15/2021

Article

The Washington Post features an article, written by DeNeen L. Brown and published on April 15, 2021, titled, "40 Acres and a Mule: How the First Reparations for Slavery Ended in Betrayal," which connects the unfulfilled promise of "Forty Acres and a Mule," part of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 that was issued on January 16, 1865, to allot land and leftover Army mules to formerly enslaved African American families, and the recently approved federal legislation to create a commission on slavery reparations. The article includes a general history of the phrase, the involvement of Black ministers in conceptualizing the plan, and the consequences of President Andrew Johnson's amnesty proclamation. The article advocates confronting history and compensating the descendants of the "thousands of Black people left without land [and] were eventually forced into sharecropping and peonage."

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