40 Acres and a Lie
September 10, 2024 at 05:30PMYou’ve probably heard the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” a reference to what the authors of this feature describe as “a broken promise and an abandoned step toward multiracial democracy” during Reconstruction. But newly digitized records reveal that the wrong done was worse than previously thought, because there were hundreds or perhaps thousands of freed Black people who did receive land rights, only to have them returned to their onetime enslavers. This is the first piece in an investigative series produced by Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal that plumbs what was a radical reparations effort swiftly undone by white powerbrokers. Many Black Americans, including the descendants of a freedman named Pompey Jackson, still feel the consequences today:
On a warm spring day in 2022, a “No Trespassing” sign dangled from a chain-link fence around a stretch of overgrown fields that were once part of Grove Hill. Some of that land is now for sale—the future location of a luxury gated community called The Habersham Plantation. An ad describes it as one of “Savannah’s hidden gems,” and promised fishing, crabbing, boating, and kayaking on the Grove River.
An empty 4-acre lot—the size of Pompey Jackson’s plot—sold for $250,000 in October 2023. Based on that sale, 40 acres on Grove Hill could be worth about $2.5 million today.
That kind of generational wealth could have had a huge impact on freedmen and their descendants, said William “Sandy” Darity Jr., an economics professor at Duke University and a leading advocate for reparations.
“There would’ve been a territory ranging from the Sea Islands to northern Florida that would’ve been essentially a coastal Black belt community,” he said. Instead, he noted, Black Americans remained plagued by a wealth gap, possessing just a quarter of the wealth held by white American families. “That would’ve had very significant implications for Black economic wellbeing as well as Black political power.”
In 1892, decades after the plantation was returned to William Habersham, the land was auctioned to pay off his family’s debts. It was purchased by one of his distant cousins, Robert Habersham Elliott, who bought all 1,700 acres for an amount equal to $544,000 in today’s dollars. Over the course of the next century, parts of the sprawling plantation would be divided, sold, and developed. In 2005, most of the land that once was Grove Hill was purchased by a developer for $3.2 million. The neighboring old manor house is now a private event space and occasional movie set.
We reached out to several of William Habersham’s potential living descendants through a genealogy platform, but they did not respond. The homeowners association at The Habersham Plantation did not respond to our call or emails.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/10/40-acres-and-a-lie/
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