General William Sherman marched his army toward Savannah, GA in a campaign to take back Georgia and end the Civil War.
After his success, he gave every family of former slaves 40 acres of land as reparations - over 400,000 total acres! But how this came about, and what happened afterward, may surprise you.
The truth is, Sherman didn’t come up with the idea. In a move that modern “white saviors” could learn from, he asked 20 leaders of the Black community what THEY wanted.
The answer was simple: land.
“The way we can best take care of ourselves,” Rev. Garrison Frazier, the appointed leader, explained, “is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.” They wanted their own land, their own community free from whites, and to be free to govern themselves. The mules came later.
This powerful example of a genuine attempt to right slavery’s wrongs, by providing former slaves with an opportunity to truly prosper, was unfortunately short-lived.
The next President, Andrew Johnson, returned the land to the treasonous white planters who originally owned it - who had just been in open rebellion against the United States!
We HAD reparations, in the form of “40 acres and a mule” - at least for a few months. How might everything have been different had it gone through? We may never know.